Listen for the music in your writing voice
Stewart Mintzer wrote this terrific poem in 10 minutes in our Writing Prompt of the Week gathering on Zoom, to the prompt of Edward Gorey’s image. He’s let his imagination roam, from the image to the events of his day to a bruise on his hand, and trusted that sensibility and music would create threads to join these disparate images and moments and ideas. Isn’t it amazing how he’s managed to capture the rhythm of waves in the flow of the words?
All of us waiting for the call to go deep,
the grace of what’s above.
Waiting for allies in all their forms that carry us
like moonlight, like rivers, like wings,
like the riders we were born to be,
over and through the sweet wild moody seas and
the stories that camouflage
the beacons of breath.
This morning at Lake Balboa
I plant feathers with prayers to medicine
pouty, broken, lost, botched techniques,
the melancholy that comes when dreams are stifled
and oceans are ignored.
Maybe what carries us, even in our stale habits
and harsh decrees, is palpable and trustworthy
when we let go of the notion of
a world with no magic.
Maybe the bruise that just appeared
on my left hand is a rune,
now in the form of a monk praying with water and life,
now a winged fire loving the moon.
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