PAD Challenge 2

From the Poetic Asides blog: For today’s prompt, I want you to write a poem in which you look at something from a different angle.

Today I've been reading Ellen Dore Watson's The Sharpening. She has a poem called "You Get Up," which inspired my poem. And I borrowed a phrase "starless time" from one of her other poems.


There are tabs acting as mini-stanza breaks that are not showing up in Blogger.


You Get Up

because daylight won’t save you
because a child’s cry reverberates across
the deepest caverns of your heart, which is
dark and stained with old, rotted love,
yet you’ve given what’s left of it to them,
these cherubs with the faces of God.
How can you not get up, fix breakfast,
take out trash, pack lunches, brush teeth, wash faces,
kiss the tops of their heads as they hug you goodbye
with a long, firm squeeze that says please come back.
You sit in traffic like a slug on a highway full of slugs,
thinking this where you are.
But you do it, you do it all and more
because there’s no one else, not any more,
because it is what it is, even in this starless time
with more questions than answers,
despite that mocking voice, yours or his,
—you just can’t tell anymore—which says
in this awful mess you’ve been given
these silver linings who call you mommy.
Get up.

Comments

Catherine said…
I really like this one. (Hope you are doing OK)
Stephanie said…
I love that first line so much.
Lisa Cohen said…
This one resonated for me, having battled with episodes of depression in the past. That first line really captured me.
January said…
Thanks Lisa. This the first poem I've written in a long time that just came to me.

Hope you are well.
January said…
Thanks Stephanie, Catherine. I'm hanging in there.

:)
Jessie Carty said…
wow! another good one. the "please come back" line just pulled at me and the image of the slug. You could have some wonderful play with this piece or another one using slugs and salt...
vidya said…
Nicely written..

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