Try your hand today at writing your own poem about a remembered, cherished landscape. It could be your grandmother’s backyard, your schoolyard basketball court, or a tiny strip of woods near the railroad tracks. At some point in the poem, include language or phrasing that would be unusual in normal, spoken speech – like a rhyme, or syntax that feels old-fashioned or high-toned.
Up in the cherry, leaves made something of me: not exactly hidden, more disappeared into June, that green which holds a girl the way a secret holds itself. The boy next door mowed his father’s grass in rows. He never looked up. I had a book, or none. Just the branch’s give under my weight, cherries past ripe, no one picking, wasps working what had fallen. What kept thee there, girl? and yet I kept; that hour before dinner when everything waited and I did not have to. His head moved back and forth at the fence. Not one thought in him that I existed. Not one. The bark left lines in my palms through dinner. My mother spoke and I was somewhere else entirely, my hands in my lap like a map of where I’d just been.
The cherry tree was mine in a way nothing else was at that age. A sanctuary, if that word isn’t too grand for a girl wedged into the fork of a backyard tree. It held me. I could think there, or not think, which was better. It also happened to overlook the neighbor’s yard perfectly. That was its own pleasure; to see without being seen, to want something from a safe distance, up in the leaves with the wasps and the overripe cherries, entirely invisible, entirely alive.
Prompt Inspiration
Via NaPoWriMo
… first read Walter de la Mare’s poem “A Song of Enchantment.” Then, John Berryman’s poem “Footing Our Cabin’s Lawn, Before the Wood.” Both poems work very differently, yet leave you with a sense of the near-fantastical possibilities of the landscapes they describe.
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