poem 6 (prose), poetry workshop

Prose poetry, any topic...

Like the End of the World
You want to take a Mental Health Year.

Disappear to a different page in your atlas and see the sights somewhere else. England Paris Belgium Cairo Tokyo. Anywhere but here. Anywhere, so long as it is out of this world when it's ended. You cannot stay home anymore, because if you do, you will have to hear everyone talk about it

again again again. There is no more cohesion, no brotherly love. There is just them. And you, standing separate, because you cannot talk about this again. And you cannot take that anymore. To stay home means that you will have to sit and watch her have a twenty five year project that could last her a lifetime.

You cannot stay home.

Welcome to the end of the world. Where there is no more love between You Your Sister Your Brother Your Family. There are secrets lies manipulation nature-versus-nurture

divergence. Lines of best fit for data that makes her immature, and you mature. Lines that make you a liar and she a mother. Lines that lead you along until there is no cohesion in the family and all there is to say is that you loved each other.

Once.

poem 7 (historical), poetry workshop

here, we were to write a poem about a place in history (a time in history). i wracked my brain and couldn't come up with an idea until i saw Cold Case the week the poem was due. that being said, Women of Wednesdays was a program where black and white women came from northern cities to help promote the civil rights movement and Freedom Schools in mississippi. check them out, as they were some really brave ladies.

it's written as a villanelle, which has a kind of repetition... a refrain, so to speak. it's hard as hell to write because you have to watch how you say what you say, to make sure that the point gets across and doesn't grate.


Wednesday's Women were full of Woe
Ordinary women, both blacks and whites,
wore their gloves and pearls to tea;
talking of revolution and civil rights--

the spark of change that ignites
a people yearning to be free.
These ordinary women, both blacks and whites,

braving a fear as dark as the nights
of Mississippi's bourgeoisie,
talking of revolution and civil rights--

a grassroots move for law rewrites,
though Southern establishments did not agree.
Ordinary women, both blacks and whites,

standing up to the Klan's oppressive Knights
to gain the future they could foresee…
sat talking of revolution and civil rights.

A lofty goal that North and South unites,
though equality was no guarantee…
ordinary women, both blacks and whites,
talked of revolution and civil rights.

if you want references, i'll post those up on request