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Each first Friday of the month the Inklings write to a challenge from one of us. This month Linda Mitchell offered the challenge from a post she saw on Instagram: “‘Find a poem you like, or one you don’t like. Write the first 6 lines of the poem. Under each line write your own response. Delete the original lines, use what you have as a beginning for your poem.’ Tusiata Avia #30in30 writing prompt.”
Once I started doing this, I couldn’t stop. Recently I bought The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry. What a wonderful mentor, nature writer, poet. On Substack for “This Photo Wants to be a Poem,” I wrote after “To the Unseeable Animal” my side by side version “To the Shadow Moving.”
For Thursday’s Spiritual Journey post, I wrote beside James Crews.
The most satisfying thing about writing like this is you can remove the original poem because your new poem is unique to you.
To What Flies
(after To What Listens by Wendell Berry)
I see it again lonely
and alone, the image of the heron
opening his wings wide
to fly to the other side,
no mate will follow,
no nest to call home.
I subscribe to Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s daily poem. (I also highly recommend her new book Wonderment.) On Sept. 26, she sent out a poem “Sometimes When I am Stuck.”
Sometimes When I am Dwelling
When I feel as if my body
is slowly shutting down,
and my spirit is made of jelly,
when my feelings
go deep as if darkness
dwells within me,
that is when I awake
to an inner peace,
ever waiting my notice, my voice.
That peace is longing
as if whispering words.
Margaret Simon, draft (after Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer)
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