Thursday, April 6, 2017

Poem 6: 13 ways (again)

Here's today's prompt from Napowrimo17:
Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a poem that looks at the same thing from various points of view. The most famous poem of this type is probably Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”. You don’t need to have thirteen ways of looking at something – just a few will do!
Hm. I did this assignment back in college (sometime in the 80s ... shudder) but I'm a fan of revisiting and remashing.

*

Homage to My Literary Parents

1
The Grimm Brothers taught me
always to fill my pockets
with white stones.

2
I wanted to be easy-going
like Pooh

but was more like Piglet,
who flapped his trotters and said

"Oh dear oh dear oh dear"
while

all around him
the world melted.

2
Nancy Drew was smart,
a true queen bee
(but with a heart of gold,
sympathy for the underdog,

and girls like me);
and she drove
a bad-ass convertible.
She made her own rules.

No matter what, her father
(she had him all to herself)
loved her, even
(especially)

when she meddled.

3
"There's no place like home,"
Dorothy said, again and again,
as if to convince herself.

4
In high school,
Stephen King's apocalypse seemed
preferable.

5
I wandered the streets
of Ray Bradbury's Mexico
in dreams

where skulls grinned from shop windows
and mummies in glass cases
pressed themselves against my eyes

: a profound truth about
the nature of the universe

6
Dear Elizabeth Bennett,
cynic and critic,
who stood by drinking punch
while Darcy glowered across the room
and said,
"What the fuck is that guy's problem?"

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