PAD Challenge Day 3: How Fast They Grow

 Today's dual prompts from the Writers Digest blog and NaPoWriMo: (1) Write a "communication" poem, and (2) write a poem based on a "personal universe deck." Basically, it's a deck of "flash cards" you create from a list of words you select with certain parameters, like the five senses, action words, only one abstraction, etc. It was conceived and presented by poet Michael McClure at a Naropa lecture in 1976. Here is a link with the specifics.

I've done "word bank" exercises like this before, like the weekly word bank posted on the Sunday Whirl blog, which I frequently use. Jane Hirshfield also had a similar exercise in her workshop at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. She called it the Poet's Painting Box, I believe - I wrote one of my best sonnets ever, for example, using that resource in her workshop. So I tried this too, selecting 100 words by free association, more or less. I didn't make the cards, but I compiled a grid of words (another option shown on the above link) and randomly picked a dozen of them "blindfold"-style. They may not be the most colorful or inspiring words ever used in a poem, but I'm fairly satisfied with where they took me. (The words I randomly picked were baby, eye, shatter, rustle, laugh, cheddar, shrimp, mint, leather, sandpaper, ice, and coffee.)

Baby
 
At five months,
his eyes follow you everywhere,
dark brown, with a knowing glint.
His coos imitate your speech
with a string of vowels, not having
figured out the consonants yet,
but for the occasional g.
He flashes broad toothless smiles
to everyone he knows,
and with a little luck, a laugh too.
Sounds get his attention -
the rustle of a favorite teddy,
the startling shattered glass.
His fingers explore how things feel -
your leather jacket,
your sandpaper cheek of whiskers,
the icy white of first snow.
Soon the world of tastes will open up,
beyond the bottle and the thumb,
and before you know it, he will
be eating shrimp and cheddar biscuits,
mint ice cream, drinking coffee,
listening to loud discordant music,
and telling you why
you're too old to understand him.