Prompt: Think of a nice thing someone said to you recently. Write a poem about a rainy day, ending with what that person said. The form is a cento ... actually, a quarter-cento, one line each from 25 poems in Barbara Kingsolver's "How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons"):
Years from now, when some passion brings new order
I will feel the cold's every angle, the want of rain.
This day in my thoughts,
the view from here reaches backward:
begin if you can at the beginning--
think of rain: the gathering sheer fall,
shallow and deep, stormy but stippled,
and this air, too much like breath--
crawls like a green bottlefly through the ear canals,
impossibly long green squashes--
is promising the drunk liquid bliss of dusk,
dancing, madly fragrant. Who knew
the mindless tasks a body learns when it must,
living mostly just the one life now,
knees to elbows, fists to the earth.
Nothing is what it was
where life had nailed us down to nothing;
the remainder looks impossible,
commands me to empty out everything--
what I will spend these hours becoming,
willing this suddenly scrambled next into something
up here, now that I know the secret:
"An amazing thing to be able to express wisdom
and experience in such a fun and clever way."
I'm going to be quiet now.
