All good things must come to an end. Thank you so much to those of you who participated in NaPoWriMo with me, for a single day or for all 30. I started this website as a way to hold myself accountable to my goal of writing every day. And it worked! Your final daily (optional) poetry prompt is all about endings.
Golden Shovel poem. Write a golden shovel poem. Find a short poem or take a line or two from a longer poem that you admire and place the words, in order, as the last words of each of the lines of your poem. Your poem can be an homage or go in a totally different direction, but you need to hit those familiar notes at the ends of your lines.
“The Golden Shovel” is the title of a poem by Terrance Hayes. The last words of the lines in Hayes’s poem are, in order, the words of the poem “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks. Many poets tried this exercise after Hayes and a new poetic form was born. Want to try it?
Here’s my Golden Shovel poem, playing on the words of “This Is Just to Say,” by William Carlos Williams.
The Icebox
Some memories I
do not tend to or have
forgotten quite intentionally. I’ve eaten
them, chewed them like the
frosted purple skins of just-picked plums.
Better that than add them to that
which I carry. Some things were
just not meant to ripen in
that way. Others lie stacked, foil-wrapped, in the
far corners of the icebox
and,
though I know that that which
does not kill you makes you
stronger, these things that were
not close to killing me, probably
not worth saving
myself from recalling, for
some reason surge up, as I sit with my breakfast.
And I must invent ways to forgive
such a young and authentic version of me.
Other memories, they
exist in perpetual re-write, were
once something so delicious
that they beg to be replayed, and so,
through overuse, the sweet
in them is worn thin and,
having hinged them in and out of the icebox so
often, they’ve grown rancid and cold.