Today, try writing a poem in which you describe something that cannot speak, and what it has taught or told you.
No preference for who shelters under it— fox or grief, it holds the same. The year ice split its main fork, it grew over the split, made a new shape, the way of surviving that isn’t really surviving. Screech owls nested in the heart-rot above the scar. Two lovers returned to it that summer and stood in its shadow and said nothing worth recording. Longer than your counting. I took the lightning twice. Raccoons know the east hollow. Deer bed against the south root. In October the squirrel buries near the drip line, and in spring finds none of it. What the oak told me when I stopped asking: you think the wound is separate from the wood.
Prompt Inspiration
Via NaPoWriMo
In “Ocean,” Robinson Jeffers delivers an almost oracular, scriptural description of the sea not just as a geographical phenomenon, but a sort of being – old, wise, profound, and able to teach those who want to learn.
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