Evocative Lines and a Looser Form

For the past week, I've been experimenting with a new way of writing poems. Before my hand surgery to repair the wrist break of my dominant hand, I would write poems longhand in a purple legal pad. I've written two blog posts (here and here) about my experience writing duplexes for my seminary project. I wanted to see what would happen if I experimented with a looser form.  I do realize that even my looser form has more structure, four line stanzas throughout, than is usual for me.

I also incorporated some evocative phrases from my Twitter feed and a Facebook instant message exchange with a friend. When I was feeling uninspired I went back to my collection of evocative lines and chose one that spoke to me. That line would often beat to the inspiration of a new line or two. I left the document open and returned to it periodically.

Thus morning, I'm calling the rough draft finished. I've posted it below, and then I posted a version with highlights to show which lines come from which source, just in case it's interesting.

Magellan’s Lighthouse


Ice saints and a blackthorn winter,
last grip of a past season.
How wonderful to eat ice cream in a graveyard
surrounded by ancestors and those who will soon join them.

On the day the sea comes to claim you,
I shall be far away in a house near a mountain range,
in a non-tropical rainforest:
brambles and thistles but at least no flooding.

Can a person who is still living haunt a place?
The future speaks to us in widow’s weeds
while I try to balance the accounts.
I am the sea that swallowed the world.

Mangoes rot before they ripen; shorebirds lose their way.
I examine the recipes from my mother’s battered box,
the buttons my grandmother saved.
I keep my powder dry while I knit socks.

I memorize the foot paths to the border
while I sort the seeds and feed the ones who depend on me.
We must test the river for tannins and sample for salt,
Reinforce the cisterns and the alarm systems.

We watched the hungry sea, turned our faces east.
We thought we could control the wind.
Instead, I crafted my own ark, a small, solitary vessel.
Am I the storm, the sea, the sand at the bottom?

In a past time, you’d have been Magellan,
while I would have been the lighthouse tender.
Now I light the lantern on the window sill,
and we pray for all who are far from home.

-------------------

lines that came from tweets of others

lines from past poetry notebooks that were never used in a finished poem

line from a Facebook message to a friend

Magellan’s Lighthouse


Ice saints and a blackthorn winter,
last grip of a past season.
How wonderful to eat ice cream in a graveyard
surrounded by ancestors and those who will soon join them.

On the day the sea comes to claim you,
I shall be far away in a house near a mountain range,
in a non-tropical rainforest:
brambles and thistles but at least no flooding.

Can a person who is still living haunt a place?
The future speaks to us in widow’s weeds
while I try to balance the accounts.
I am the sea that swallowed the world.

Mangoes rot before they ripen; shorebirds lose their way.
I examine the recipes from my mother’s battered box,
the buttons my grandmother saved.
I keep my powder dry while I knit socks.

I memorize the foot paths to the border
while I sort the seeds and feed the ones who depend on me.
We must test the river for tannins and sample for salt,
Reinforce the cisterns and the alarm systems.

We watched the hungry sea, turned our faces east.
We thought we could control the wind.
Instead, I crafted my own ark, a small, solitary vessel.
Am I the storm, the sea, the sand at the bottom?

In a past time, you’d have been Magellan,
while I would have been the lighthouse tender.
Now I light the lantern on the window sill,
and we pray for all who are far from home.