W3 Prompt #20: Wea’ve Written Weekly

Intro

Dear friends,

Welcome to our W³ Poetry Prompt, which goes live on Wednesdays at The Skeptic’s Kaddish.

You may click here for a fuller explanation of W³; but here’s the ‘tldr’ version:

Part I

The main ingredient of W³ is a weekly poem written by a Poet of the Week (PoW), which participants respond to in verse.

Part II

The second ingredient is a writing guideline (or two) provided by the PoW. Guidelines may include, but are not limited to: word counts, poetic forms, inclusion of specific words, and use of particular poetic devices.

Part III

After four days, when the prompt closes, the PoW shall select one participant’s poem as the W³ prompt for the following week, and its author becomes the next PoW.

Simple enough, right?

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Okie dokie ~ Let’s do this thing!

I. The prompt poem:

‘Aurora’ by Aditi Sharma

The castles, the wars, the unwavering heart, moments of helplessness, creeping their way from places so dark and I knew you were happy, I knew you were sad, but when I felt all alone, I found you in those hidden trails, in the forsaken crevices of my heart, emerging like aurora, I had never felt those butterflies, overfilling my soul with the urge to encompass these boundaries between fiction and the facts and live inside that dream, while you delicately guide me across your masterpiece, I need to listen more, why everything fell apart and why still the love remains, I never knew what love felt like but it must feel like admiring this art, to find my way across its heart and fancying to live here till forever falls apart.

II. Aditi’s prompt guidelines

• Write a Pantoum poem;
• The theme should be: Anything dreamy, something non-existent in the real world, or just about your real-life dreams.

Pantoum?

The pantoum consists of a series of quatrains rhyming ABAB in which the 2^nd and 4^th lines of a quatrain recur as the 1^st and 3^rd lines in the succeeding quatrain; each quatrain introduces a new 2^nd rhyme as BCBC, CDCD.

The first line of the series recurs as the last line of the closing quatrain, and third line of the poem recurs as the 2^nd line of the closing quatrain, rhyming ZAZA.

Click here for more information about the ‘pantoum’ form.

III. Submit: Click on ‘Mr. Linky’ below

In order to participate and share a poem, open up this blog post, outside of the WordPress reader. At the bottom, just below these words, you will see a small rectangular graphic with the words ‘Mr Linky’. Click on that to submit.

Submissions are open for 4 days, until Sunday, September 18, 10:00 AM (GMT+3)

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Last week’s W³ poem

This week’s W³ prompt poem (above), composed by Aditi Sharma, was written in response to last week’s W³ prompt poem, which Britta Benson wrote:

‘Boots on the ground’ by Britta Benson

When that last leaf falls,
when autumn becomes all,
we hold on to sinuous fibres, bend,
tangle, gnarl our anxious souls
into awkward, bloodless knots, 
clumps of quiet devastation.

When that last leaf falls,
when autumn becomes all,
we bind hope with old spider thread, 
collect conkers, seeds, fill pockets
in our need to preserve futures, pasts, 
gone, long before we were ready.

When that last leaf falls,
when autumn becomes all,
we gasp, watch warm breath disperse,
then resist this most courteous invitation
to traverse the air, forget destinations,
let go of fear and regret, just because. 

Still, we stop and stare at cold stones.
Amongst rust gold, burnt amber, moss,
we applaud nature’s reckless self-sacrifice.
Forever scared of change, we touch graves,
waiting for signs, shelter, courage, home,
as our weatherproof boots root deeper into loss.