PAD Day 17: A Generational Plant

 Today's prompts from Write Better Poetry and NaPoWriMo: (1) Write a "nerve" poem, and (2) "write a poem that contains the name of a specific variety of edible plant – preferably one that grows in your area[....]In the poem, try to make a specific comparison between some aspect of the plant’s lifespan and your own – or the life of someone close to you. Also, include at least one repeating phrase."

I have an idea for the first prompt but haven't really worked on it yet - maybe later today.

For the NaPoWrimMo prompt, I'm resurrecting a poetic form I created. I was inspired by my friend Anna Evans, an excellent formal poet who created a new form called the "haikoum," a cross between the haiku and the pantoum. Here is an example. I then created my own variation, the "panku," which combined different aspects of each form. Whereas Anna's form retains the 5-7-5 haiku structure but weaves in the repeating pattern of lines of the pantoum, my panku form is in couplets, with all 7-syllable lines, each third line being a repeated line, in a pattern of 

AB  CA  DC  ED  FE... B[X], 

where X is the third to last line of the poem. 

So in the poem I wrote today, the lines are repeated in the pattern: 

AB  CA  DC  ED  FE  GF  HG  IH  JI  KJ  LK  BL. 

Every line is used exactly twice, with some minor variations here and there. Like Anna's haikoum, my panku, "Careful in the Fog" was previously published in the online journal Tilt-a-Whirl (now, sadly, defunct), which specialized in repeating form poetry. Here is my new one:

Heirloom 
 
from a cutting in her yard
my grandmother's peppermint
 
has thrived for twenty-five years
From a cutting in her yard
 
it crowded my back garden
thriving for twenty five years
 
fifteen years after she died
it's crowded my back garden
 
with little purple flowers
fifteen years after she's died
 
but we still pinch off the leaves
and little purple flowers
 
smell the oil on our fingers
when we pinch off the leaves
 
and use them in our kitchen
fragrant oil on our fingers
 
that calming fresh aroma
when it's used in our kitchen
 
it keeps giving and giving
the calming fresh aroma
 
will probably outlive me
it keeps giving and giving
 
my grandmother's peppermint
will probably outlive me