PAD Chapbook Challenge Day 18

Today's prompt from Poetic Asides: Write a "music" poem. I've written dozens of them over the years, including one just two days ago, so I thought I'd add another element to the prompt by dusting off another prompt I came up with a few years ago that serves me well from time to time: Take any random list of songs  - a shuffled playlist from your streaming app, MP3 files, CD, radio station, etc. - and take the titles of the next five songs on your list. Then try to incorporate those titles into the language of a poem. Here are the five songs I got from my Amazon Music playlist:


“On a Bright May Morning” by Loreena McKennitt“Trouble” by Coldplay“Walls and Cannonballs” by Sister Hazel“Mercury” by Sufjan Stevens“So Beautiful or So What” by Paul Simon

And here's the poem that resulted:

Rona's Song

On a bright May morning she stands

on the overlook to a desert valley.

She adjusts her bandana

against the wind and sand.

So much trouble, she tells herself -

the centuries of war and struggles,

the walls and cannonballs,

now crumbling and rusted,

the recently-ruined temples,

which stood for thousands of years,

and newer forces pouring like mercury

over the already punished land.  

You can say, So beautiful, or so what, 

she thinks, as she shoulders her weapon

and starts off to rejoin her unit.

On the way, she composes a song in her head

about how peace someday may come.



I actually "cheated" on my own prompt by listing ten song titles and eliminating three that i thought would be a little to hard to use in a poem. But I also used, in a way, two more of them: “Ronnie” by the Four Seasons (a love song about a woman named Ronnie), but changed it to “Rona”, which is an Arabic name, as I imagined the subject as a Kurdish fighter. I also used “bandana” from the title “Turkish Bandana” by J.S.Ondara, but dropped “Turkish” because I doubt a Kurdish fighter would wear something Turkish. It's interesting how the titles suggested the subject, especially "walls and cannonballs" - there had to be something about war. And the Loreena McKennitt title begged to be a first line.