In your poem for today, we challenge you to write your own poem in which you muse on your name and nicknames you’ve been given or, if you like, the name and nicknames for an animal, plant, or place. For example, I’ve always been amused at the fact that red trillium (a rather pretty wildflower that grows in the woods near my house) has several other common names, including the bizarre “stinking benjamin.” The plant grows very short and close to the ground, so I’ve never actually leaned over far enough to get a whiff and see how merited that sobriquet is!
Today, I chose Ghost Pipe because it's in our woods in more than one place. And also because it's a fascinating plant with no chlorophyll, that lives off the fungi that live off oak trees.
Five names for the same pale stalk— ghost pipe, Indian pipe, corpse plant, fairy smoke, ice plant— as if whoever stumbled on it first had to name it before they could walk away. Ghost pipe: yes. That hollow bow. A cluster of them rising from the mulch like something that hasn’t decided yet whether it belongs here or somewhere else entirely. Indian pipe: someone else’s name pressed onto someone else’s world. You know how that went. Corpse plant. Those people didn’t want to get close. Hard to argue. Fairy smoke. Someone’s grandmother, maybe, telling a child don’t touch, then relenting: but isn’t it something. Monotropa uniflora: turning once, toward one flower. Latin doing what Latin does, describing the shape as if that settles it. No chlorophyll. No green. Lives off fungi that live off oak roots; all of it happening underground where no one has thought to name anything yet. Up here: just this. White and waxy, already going black at the edges; the minute you touch it, it starts forgetting your name.
Prompt Inspiration
Via NaPoWriMo
In her poem, “Names and Nicknames,” Monika Kumar reminisces over various nicknames she has been given, the actual name her mother gave her, and the way both names and nicknames indicate a claim and an intimacy at once.
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