For today’s challenge, write a poem in which you respond to a favorite poem by another poet.
A favorite poem of mine is: THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS by Wendell Berry When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
This is my response. WHAT THE HERON DOES NEXT by Caro Henry Wendell, I went. Not in despair, more that 3 a.m. thing with no name for it, just feet on cold floor and then the path downhill. Creek at the bottom, heron in his patience, reed-still, neck kinked back. And something in me did what you said it would. I’ll give you that. But then he struck—and that water closed over the absence like nothing had happened. Which was true. One small fish gone from the world, and the heron already still again. Grace is real. I stood in it. But on the way back up the hill I was counting again: bills, the news, what I’d said wrong the week before. Heron didn’t follow. Why would he?
Prompt Inspiration
Via NaPoWriMo
Sergio Raimondi’s poem, “Today Matsuo Basho Cooks,” plays on the following haiku by (you guessed it), Matsuo Basho:
Crimson pepper pod!
Add two pairs of wings, and look—
darting dragonfly.
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