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.
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. (Wikipedia)
Quillfyre 