Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem in which the speaker is in dialogue with him or herself.
Inside me lives a small, opinionated wren. She disapproves of most things. “That coat,” she’ll say, “looks like a bad apology.” It’s cold, I tell her. Warmth is the point. “Warmth,” she says, “is never the point.” She came to me around forty. Before that I made plans and kept them, mostly. Now she chimes in at the produce section, at the moment I say “I’m fine” when I’m somewhere between fine and not. “Which is it?” she asks. “Both,” I say. “At the same time?” “Yes.” She considers this and drops the subject, which feels like a concession. It isn’t. When my mother died she went quiet. Two full weeks at the base of my sternum, still. I kept waiting for some small instruction. Nothing came. I didn’t know I needed that. Now she thinks I should write more. The garden, she says, can manage itself. “But the hellebores—” I start. “Will do what hellebores do,” she says, “with or without your supervision.” She has already picked out a pot on the porch and begun arranging things to her liking. I ask if she’s planning to stay. She tilts her head the way wrens tilt their heads, which means she has no answer, or has one she finds too obvious to say.
Prompt Inspiration
Via NaPoWriMo
Jaswinder Bolina’s poem “Mood Ring” imagines the speaker as both himself and an interior being (who happens to take the form of a small donkey). It’s quite silly . . . and not silly at the same time. A sort of “serious fun.”
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