PAD Challenge Day 5: The Shapes a Bright Container Can Contain

 Today's prompts from Robert Lee Brewer of Writers Digest is to write a poem with the title "The First _______." Maureen Thorson's NaPoWriMo prompt is more involved, so I'll quote her:

"I call this one 'The Shapes a Bright Container Can Contain,' after this poem by Theodore Roethke, which I adored in high school – and can still recite!

"This prompt challenges you to find a poem, and then write a new poem that has the shape of the original, and in which every line starts with the first letter of the corresponding line in the original poem. If I used Roethke’s poem as my model, for example, the first line would start with 'I,' the second line with 'W,' and the third line with 'A.' And I would try to make all my lines neither super-short nor overlong, but have about ten syllables. I would also have my poem take the form of four, seven-line stanzas. I have found this prompt particularly inspiring when I use a base poem that mixes long and short lines, or stanzas of different lengths."

A challenging one, but an exercise I ended up enjoying very much. I chose a poem by Jane Hirshfield as my source, "Today, When I Could Do Nothing."  It was written in March of last year just as her home area of San Francisco went on lockdown, and first published in the San Francisco Chronicle, but too new to be included in her most recent poetry collection, Ledger. It was immediately popular, because although it focused ostenibly on her rescue of an intruder ant in her home, it spoke universally to all of us feeling those first pangs of pandemic isolation. Anyway, here is my poem.

The First Year 

This has been a brutal time.
I am still here.
 
I've been lucky enough to dodge disaster,
sanity still intact
through this morning, at least.
 
Are we now seeing the tunnel's bright end?
 
It depends on all of us.
 
I hold out hope
today
and pray
sensible people will prevail.
 
I watched a Cooper's hawk
take down a robin yesterday morning
then feast in my backyard.
 
That robin may have thought it was safe
till talons hooked into it.
 
Scales try to balance
commerce with the risk -
many want to eat out, exercise, drink.
 
Science says, not just yet;
immunity's the key, shots in arms essential.
Watch the numbers and graphs.
 
I see a red fox lope across my lawn.
Eventually, nature balances itself.
Where do we fit in, and how much longer?
 
Are we even deserving?
Will this be our extinction event?
Hubris can be a fatal flaw.
 
I mask, I wash, I distance.
 
This spring when everything strives to open,
connect, expand
beyond the confines of homes and bubbles,
I tread lightly.

 

And here is my friend Jane's, against which I can only aspire to compare:

Today, When I Could Do Nothing

by Jane Hirshfield

Today, when I could do nothing,
I saved an ant.

It must have come in with the morning paper,
still being delivered
to those who shelter in place.

A morning paper is still an essential service.

I am not an essential service.

I have coffee and books,
time,
a garden,
silence enough to fill cisterns.

It must have first walked
the morning paper, as if loosened ink
taking the shape of an ant.

Then across the laptop computer — warm —
then onto the back of a cushion.

Small black ant, alone,
crossing a navy cushion,
moving steadily because that is what it could do.

Set outside in the sun,
it could not have found again its nest.
What then did I save?

It did not move as if it was frightened,
even while walking my hand,
which moved it through swiftness and air.

Ant, alone, without companions,
whose ant-heart I could not fathom —
how is your life, I wanted to ask.

I lifted it, took it outside.

This first day when I could do nothing,
contribute nothing
beyond staying distant from my own kind,
I did this.

[Reprinted with permission of the author.]