Poem Is Small Kindnesses by Danusha Lameris
Writing Prompt: On left side in a vertical column: 5 -10 concrete nouns. Make them different from each other.
On the right side of the page, do the same vertical columns - 5-10 abstract nouns. Any school subject, any emotion, ideas…Things you can’t touch.
In between each two words in both set of columns, write the word “OF” Should give you a set “coffee cup of science” or switch order “science of coffee cups”
Pick one of these sets or constellations of words that excites you and begin a piece of writing.
On left side in a vertical column: 5 -10 concrete nouns. Make them different from each other.
On the right side of the page, do the same vertical columns - 5-10 abstract nouns. Any school subject, any emotion, ideas…Things you can’t touch.
In between each two words in both set of columns, write the word “OF” Should give you a set “coffee cup of science” or switch order “science of coffee cups”
Pick one of these sets or constellations of words that excites you and begin a piece of writing.
You have roughly 10 minutes.
Freewrite 1
In the mirror, grief waited
patiently for light to surrender,
and for the darkness to follow.
Its silvered tongue spoke of the past
when women plumbed its depths,
scrying the future from the dross.
I was once one of those women,
living in the USSR, one winter, waiting
for a glimpse of the future.
And now here we are.
The old beveled mirror, someone’s discard,
silver scratched off the back,
faithfully reflects the light, sharpens its teeth,
while I measure shadows crawling across the room
where containment is equal to life.
The banshee wailing at the door, is hunting again.
So many fallen, I do not know where to begin,
or how to comprehend such grief.
My pen is mute, filled with darkness,
my hand speaks of loss, trying on other dreams
in the mirror when I am not looking.
The clock is writing down the calendar of days.
We grow used to the genteel confinement.
It becomes our familiar. We become inured to it.
Yet the world rages on, a lethal stew of protesters,
AntiFa and AltRigh boiling in the streets
as if naming it could quell the civil unrest.
Tearing down statues of oppression
and tearing down what was once good—
there is no filter. It is all fodder for the rage that burns.
And we sit in our towers watching the wind
bending the tall grass to its will
as the ashes of the dead ride on the breeze.
Next Prompt: Write down some things that people might actually say.
Next, write down 1-3 factual statements. Simple sentences that are true. For example: “The earth is round.”
Last thing to write down: one question.
Cheating is allowed. Change any elements. Write a poem which is someway relevant to your reality (and unreality.) Write a poem that has actual spoken words or dialogue in some way in it. Be aware of the typographical possibilities as well as the possibilities of how many ways there are to work dialogue into a poem: in passing, as the main way the poem moves, or something in between, or a momentary breaking of the fourth wall. Optional: include a fact, a question, or both.
Model poems:
The Act by William Carlos Willams
In the Desert by Stephen Crane
A Note on ‘Iowa City: Early April’ by Robert Hass
[from Citizen] by Claudia Rankine
Table by Edip Canceler, translated by Richard Tillinghast from the Turkish
10 minutes… Write a poem which is someway relevant to this moment in your reality (and unreality.) Write a poem that has actual spoken words or dialogue in some way in it. Be aware of the typographical possibilities as well as the possibilities of how many ways there are to work dialogue into a poem: in passing, as the main way the poem moves, or something in between, or a momentary breaking of the fourth wall. Optional: include a fact, a question, or both.
Where to even begin? The mind wants answers,
and some are satisfied with any answers
that will do, no matter how impossible.
People are grasping at straws as if they were liferafts
in the deep end of the COVID pool.
Lemmings flock to the beaches, as if to find the answer,
the first terrestrial “I am” ever uttered.
I want to tell the gobies and the mudskippers
there’s been a mistake, but I’ve said it all before
in another poem, long ago, when I was someone else.
As we look down the hind site
of that long barreled gun of time,
we can’t even imagine anything else but this moment,
frozen, in the perpetual now.
Each act takes us farther from ourselves,
and what we once held to be true,
makes us re-define our lives with a new timeframe,
so that we can barely remember
anything other than now.
What is happening to time?
As we speed headlong
towards our own extinction.
