Writing Without the Me #5

Exercise #11 Answering A Poem

If somehow this is your first time here, this explains what this whole string of entries is about. This particular entry is about poetry. I don’t feel like it’s important or necessary to go over the prompt too much today. I’ve decided I spend too much time explaining my choices, complaining in a child-like fashion about the way Joselow— the author of Writing Without the MuseI— describes the exercises, and getting frustrated by their details.

So instead you get this:

A photo of words!
“C. Take one line from the poem and use it as the first line for a poem of your own, one that need not resemble the original poem at all.”

I used Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” as my starting point. It was fun! I like rhyming and matching the meter, and allowing that to inform what the poem will be about. I don’ t know what it says about me that I feel this way, but I do feel like this entry was a bit of a cheat, like I got away with getting an easy one in.

Anyway, here’s what I came up with:

Whose woods these are I think I know.
Her reach is long. Her voice is low.
She sees the future but does not fear
What her visions have to show.

My milky horse must think it queer
To stop without our next house near
Between the Task and twisting fate
We silently await the seer.

From leg to leg I shift my weight
unsure whose hunger would be sate.
And then the realizations creep:
The prophetess won’t hold our date.

Her secrets will stay buried deep.
I pray for rain so I may weep
While finding those who I must reap
Visiting strangers in their sleep