Just wanted to share something first: I attended the book launch party for the annual poetry journal U.S. 1 Worksheets today in Princeton NJ. As usual, it was well-attended, and dozens of poets read their poems that are included in the new issue (#63 - it may be one of the longest-running small independent journals in the country - they have been publishing for 45 years!) Anyway, I got to read my sonnet "Dewey-eyed', which I wrote for last year's April PAD challenge. Thanks as always to Nanacy Scott, Dave Worrell, and everyone else involved.
Today's dual prompts from Poetic Asides and NaPoWriMo: (1) write a "family" poem (that is, about a family), and (2) write a poem where mysterious and magical things occur. I guess both prompts are rather peripheral to what I turned out, but oh well:
Hazel in the Tree
House
My granddaughter took the color of her eyes
and made it the name of her imaginary friend.
Hazel lived in a house in the cherry tree.
Hazel would invite her up to play
in the tree house with her pet baby elephant,
and they would all dance a kind of jitterbug.
When she would bring her fairy wings
and magic wand, Hazel turned into
a real fairy and made her one too.
They flitted around the windows
of the houses of the neighborhood
and peeked in. Hazel was the one who made
her tree blossom all pink-white in April.
But eventually imaginary friends move on,
usually to another town, with another name
to be friends with other girls and boys.
So it was after one more spring spectacular
that exploded the cherry tree with flowers,
when Hazel left, practically overnight.
The blossoms faded a few days later,
and the wind caught up the falling petals
into a swirling cascade that to most people
looked like snow, but to Madison
they looked like tears.
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