NaPoWriMo April 1, 2016 FPR Impromptu – Remembering Cement

Poets.ca NPM Banner

glopo2016button2

 

Still working on April 1st, from the Found Poetry Review prompt generator provided by Patrick Williams.  His generator takes stacks of books he has compiled (as a librarian) and suggests a random prompt to be applied to the located text.  Link to the site: http://www.foundpoetryreview.com/blog/national-poetry-month-2016/

My first prompt:  Write a poem on the first memory encountered in “these two pages” from the generator.  That gave me this:  an article on concrete, with the following text actually readable:  concrete stone in brushed-out surface, used in military academy buildings.  The building is the Northwestern Military and Naval Academy at Lake Geneva Wisc.  My memories of concrete come from childhood, rather than go the cemetery statuary route :

 

Remembering Concrete

 

I was six or maybe seven the day we went walking while
they changed the electric cycle from sixty to one-ten.
Grey grit still draws its dark scar across my knee, in memory
of where I fell along the cinder walk.

Soon after, we kids were happy when great lumbering trucks
arrived with workmen dressed for spreading cement: new sidewalks
over the cinder bits. We no longer needed to walk awkwardly
on steel wheels of roller skates that wouldn’t skate over grit.

photo: C. Stephen

A year or two after that, I’d remember the concrete road outside our house,
where I first learned to ride my electric blue two-wheeler.  Rainbow streamers
and fancy reflectors did nothing to keep me stable and I went down hard,
no scars but these days — my back aches when it rains.

 

Carol A. Stephen

April 1, 2016

Line art drawing of a roller skate.

Line art drawing of a roller skate. (Wikipedia)

2 thoughts on “NaPoWriMo April 1, 2016 FPR Impromptu – Remembering Cement

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.