NaPoWriMo halfway there mini victory dance! I hope you are having as much fun as I am poets. Your daily (optional) poetry prompt is all about celebrating your progress. Keep writing!
Ode to your craving. Today I want you to write about something you are craving. An exquisite pastry? A juicy steak? That bottle of wine you’ve been saving? Little handmade caramels with pink Himalayan sea salt on top? Maybe what you’re craving isn’t food. Maybe it’s an afternoon with a good book. A hot bath. Playing hooky to see a movie. Maybe it isn’t something but someone. Maybe it’s something intangible. A moment of solitude? Permission to vocalize something you’ve been keeping inside you? The satisfaction of Marie Kondo-ing your closets? Whatever it is, to write the poem properly you must do research. To the extent feasible (and legal), go ahead and indulge in your craving. You heard me. And pay very close attention to every last detail of that experience. Savor it. Relish it. Then write about it.
And consider writing an ode. The ode is a lyrical, celebratory poetic form. There are several formal types you can try. But my favorite are the skinny meandering odes of Pablo Neruda. Neruda wrote many, many odes, to things both great and small, but he had an uncanny way of paying sincere homage to utterly ordinary things, like his socks, an artichoke he saw in the market, or a bowl of chowder.
As a working parent of small children with a hobby that gets me up early each day, it is perhaps no great surprise that what I usually crave is my pillow.
Ode to Pillows
When my body,
full of my babies,
sunk to bed
like stones
in a river,
there was a
snake-length
of pillow that
I coiled about me.
Cupped as if
by a pair of hands,
I was presented,
like an offering,
on the white
square bed.
Tucked between
the knob-stones
of my knees
and ankles,
that pillow
cinched
me tight.
I was proclaimed
by those ramparts
a bastion
of the night,
a barricaded
edifice
of baby-making.
The French
call it l’oreiller—
after l’oreille,
the ear—a word
briskly dismissive
of all but the
proper
side-sleeping
position.
My ears have
bedded down
in little fields
of pleasantly
unyielding
dimpled
egg crate,
have passed,
as if through
molasses,
into pistachio-green
memory foam,
and felt it rise
again like
bread rolls
in the morning,
have been
submerged
in the
heavy-rustling
sigh of
goose down
feathers.
I have marveled
at snow-white
pillows rising,
like mountain ranges,
against the
headboards
of hotel beds,
my ears
little alpinists
ready to try
those peaks.
But there is
something
providential
about you,
my own pillow,
your divine
air-spun cumulous,
your dual nature:
warm side
all smoldering
embers,
cool side wind
whistling through
wintergreen.
Tickle-tumble place
for babies
in mama’s big,
high bed,
crushed repose
for the tossings
of a fevered
sickness,
you know
what I whisper
to my man
at night,
and what
he whispers
back.
Stripping you
for wash day
I see your
shy tea stains,
timid traces
of a flock
of fluttered
exhalations.
They seem like
clandestine
messages
raised from
invisible ink.
You have
grown thin,
dear friend,
and tired,
and with
a pang of guilt
I wonder
if it isn’t time.