Piss-en-lit! Taraxacum!
Yesterday’s NaPoWriMo prompt was to use a prescribed list of words and include 5 or more in a poem. Jo Bell’s prompt was to write about something that was growing. So I did both: PROMPT-JAM. Yeah.
As I walked near where I live yesterday, I noticed a patch of grass with lots of dandelions on it – and I was thinking about John Donne and his poem Sun Rising. There was an Afternoon Drama about him on last week – The Flea (which was wonderful: a great rendering of some of the poems and a great dramatisation of that moment where he met his young wife – you can listen to it here for the next couple of days and I recommend you to!).
So this poem’s a response to Sun Rising with a slightly different cosmology in mind – using that wonderful line ‘nothing else is’ as a starting point.
And, of course, sneaking in lots of those pesky words from the NaPoWriMo list*.
Rising Suns
or, What About Everything Else?
If nothing else is, then what is this? Oh
bilious soil, gerrymandering generator
of dunderheaded dandelions. Lying
on this lawn’s gutter
trying to be stars.
Piss-en-lit! Taraxacum!
You are the cowbird’s feed –
no more than seaweed
on this ocean green.
Do they not know the Sun
is non-pareil? Cyclops Sky,
look the other way from
earth’s rodomontade! Its
jagged leaf-curls, its petal-sways
firing a gaudy artillery
of interstellar rays.
For there is no centre,
not in you, not in me:
only endless circles,
miraculous spheres;
svelte self-similarity,
and ego’s ghostly tears.
*Words included (some slightly altered in form! Is that allowed?) from NaPoWriMo’s prompt:
generator
miraculous
dunderhead
cyclops
seaweed
gutter
non-pareil (having no equal)
artillery
curl
ego
rodomontade
twice
ghost
cowbird
svelte