For National Poetry Month, I am writing poems inspired by words, sentences, and images in Virginia Woolf’s Diary.
Yesterday we went for a walk in Wind Cave National Park. There is no green yet to prairie grasses, and I didn’t think there was anything visibly growing. But when I left the path to give an older couple a whole lot of social distancing space, I noticed something I hadn’t seen before.
Hidden in all that dead grass, two blooming pasqueflowers! The Internet shows flashy purple pasqueflowers, but where I live, they are usually he palest lavender, sometimes nearly white.
I’m still working with the diary passage from yesterday: “all the prelude to Spring–the vague discomfort & melancholy & a feeling of having come to anchor.”
Today’s form is a skinny, which is quite constrained. Created by Truth Thomas, it consists of 11 lines. Lines 1 and 11 can be any length but they must each use the same words, though rearrangement of words is allowed. Lines 2-10 consist of just one word each, and lines 2, 6, and 10 repeat the same word.
Day #11: Prelude to Spring: A Skinny
Still winter on the yellow prairie
wait!
pasqueflower’s
furled
petals
wait
purple
unfolding
spring
waits
on the still wintry yellow prairie.
the dirigible plum 
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