Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem in which you recount a childhood memory. Try to incorporate a sense of how that experience indicated to you, even then, something about the person you’d grow up to be.
My mother moves down the row without looking up, pinching what’s gone over, brown at the edges, done. I follow behind, pick up the dead heads, put them in the basket; that’s my job, and the morning is warm, and I am part of something. What am I after, even now? Not the woods exactly, not the tomatoes staked and tied, not the basil going leggy— but my breathing, regulated, the way it finds something outside itself. Peppers sitting there, stubborn, slow, doing what they’re going to do regardless. My mother probably didn’t know she was teaching me anything. She was just deadheading flowers, and I had a basket, contented.
Prompt Backstory
Via NaPoWriMo
In her poem, “Pittsylvania County,” Ellen Bryant Voigt recounts watching her father and brother play catch with sensory detail and a strangely foreboding sense of inevitability. The speaker watches the scene, but is outside of it – cut off. She’s not so much jealous of the interaction between her father and brother, as filled with a pervading sense that she wants something more or different from life than what the moment seems to presage.
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