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Thursday, April 24, 2014

Something About a Wall...

Today's Napowrimo suggestion (have I been in error, heretofore calling it a 'challenge'?)  is to write a poem that features walls, bricks, stones, arches, or the like.  Robert Frost writes famously about a wall.  Not wanting to channel his words, though I admire so many of his poems because I too write (or try to write) in a conversational style of poetry,

 I consider the walls in my life.
Are they walls, or simply roads not taken?
A theme of not quite making it?
Or an embarassing wealth of choices?
Is this the beginning of a poem?                      (Stay tuned, we will make something  
My mother left, with her final instructions,                                      of this theme yet.)
a poem about a rose and a wall.                     (We had it printed in the funeral leaflet.)
...something about not mourning a rose
formerly blooming next to a wall, because
"the rose still blooms beyond the wall."
My mother, ever with me, instructing,
encouraging, holding out possibility
beyond every wall, singing to me
ways to be
happy.
                                 --Shirley Smith Franklin

Can a flower actually grow through a wall? I suppose, if it were a stone wall.  Stone wall, now there's an image and an idiom.  Hmm. These days we have concrete and granite...if walls were such, would they admit a rose?  (At this point in writing, I go back to the foregoing sentences that hint of poetry and separate them as they appear, above, now. The italicized words are not part of the poem.)

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