Today’s challenge asks you to write your own poem in which you use at least three metaphors for a single thing, include an exclamation, ruminate on the definition of a word, and come back in the closing line to the image or idea with which you opened the poem.
Aurora borealis: a rough draft the sky keeps starting over, or the atmosphere trying on colors before it settles on dark, or a river: uphill, glowing, without a name. I want to call it beautiful but beautiful is what we say when we run out of words, and I haven’t run out yet. Oh, the words I’ve run out of! Borealis from boreas, the north wind; the wind that carries the light, or the light that rides the wind. We named the thing for what brought it. Which is how naming usually goes. My mother died in 2014. My dog last August. Two directions I keep pointing at without a name for the space between them. Someone told me the lights are brightest in the hours before dawn. I believe this without having seen it. Aurora: the goddess, but also just that hour when dark starts to admit something. A rough draft the sky keeps starting, still running uphill, still unnamed, still that river nobody finished mapping before the cold came in.
Prompt Inspiration
Via NaPoWriMo
In her poem, “The Apple Tree in Blossom,” Melissa Kwasny strings together several fantastical metaphors for the apple tree, before shifting into exclamations, definitions, and a series of nimble, tonal shifts – and seeming changes in topic – before circling around back to the apple tree.
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