Prompt #1 from NaPoWriMo is to write a poem beginning with a first line from another poem. Here is my poem, which inspired the title of my chapbook, Above the Hum of Yellow Jackets, that starts with a first line from Yusef Komunyakaa‘s You and I Are Disappearing.
I’m told that posting poems on a blog is considered by some publishers to be published work, so this is my offering instead. (For the record, though, I DID write a poem. Not only does it begin with the first line of another poem, but coincidentally is an arrival poem, which goes to the prompt over on the Writer’s Digest PAD Challenge
I didn’t look at that one till after the poem was already done, but since it starts “She simply arrives one day”, a line from Imagining Cassandra by Rhonda Douglas, it is so appropriate to the prompt.
Here’s my poem:
It Changes the Hour
The cry I bring down from the hills
spills upon the surface
of a stone skipping the pond
on a morning in summer.
It bleeds into the sound of the day,
an octave above the hum of yellow-jackets.
It is scented with limes and olives.
Children dance in its tremolo.
The cry I bring down from the hills
waits to be heard.
Light bends into the songs it sings
inside our heads.
It changes the hour,
perfumes it with mountain air
the colour of hummingbirds
the taste of strawberries.
the first line is from a poem “You and I Are Disappearing —
Bjorn Hakansson” by Yusef Komunyakaa
photo: nrpphoto.BIGSTOCK.COM
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