In the month of May, author Kaitlin Curtice hosted a poetry challenge on her blog, asking readers to write a poem a day based on a prompt word. Here are some of my favorites that I wrote that month.
May poem day 16: Un-Love
It wasn’t always a desert,
this landscape of bone and dust.
From the airplane window I see the wriggles
of stolen rivers
bled dry,
redirected to the tumorous suburban sprawl,
spreading green, leaving brown.
What happens when we undo the love the earth has shown us?
What becomes of the rivers dried up?
May poem day 17: Disruption
I live on the edge of two tectonic plates
hovering against each other—
the New Madrid Fault, they call it,
as if the floating pieces of earth were a mistake.
The plates have stayed well behaved
in my lifetime,
though I’m haunted by the story
off the earthquake that made the Mississippi flow backward for twenty-four hours.
It’s always tornado season here—
the sirens and green skies drive us to the basement again and again—
but for some reason it’s an earthquake that I truly fear:
for if the earth itself isn’t stable,
what is?
May poem day 19: God
God came to me one day
as a squirrel.
He plunked down on the porch railing
outside my open window and began
chewing a walnut,
contented.
I couldn’t look away
from his shiny black eyes
and the muttering scrape of his teeth on the shell.
Incarnation is anywhere,
even in a squirrel.
~~~
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