Yayy! We’ve finally reached the end of this year’s NaPoWriMo. I’d like to thank everybody who read my poems, liked, commented and helped me through another month but that’ll be a separate post, once my blog’s fixed. For all those who’ve been reading my blog and have a fair idea of how it looked, you know that it does not look the same. Well, my theme ‘retired’- that’s what the system showed and I tried and tested a few themes and now I can’t go back. Given the fact that my techical capabilities are not the best, it might take a time to get my blog back to the way it looked. I have asked the WordPress Helpdesk to help me restore it. I only hope they’re able to do it soon. Anyway, the prompt for today is to write a poem made of lines from other poems. I decided to simply pick up my diary and pull out lines from poems that touched me in the last one year.
“Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a cento. This is a poem that is made up of lines taken from other poems. If you’d like to dig into an in-depth example, here’s John Ashbery’s cento “The Dong with the Luminous Nose,” and here it is again, fully annotated to show where every line originated. A cento might seem like a complex undertaking – and one that requires you to have umpteen poetry books at your fingertips for reference – but you don’t have to write a long one. And a good way to jump-start the process is to find an online curation of poems about a particular topic (or in a particular style), and then mine the poems for good lines to string together. You might look at the Poetry Foundation’s collection of love poems, or its collection of poems by British romantic poets, or even its surprisingly expansive collection of poems about (American) football“
Here’s my poem- ‘Hope’ the little birdie, that’s yours
If it is your nature to be happy* You will swim away along the soft trails You do not have to walk on your knees** For a hundred miles through the desert repenting When grief sits with you, it's tropical heat thickening the air*** Heavy as water Know that you aren't alone**** The whole world shares your tears What happens to a dream deferred?***** Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? There's something ****** Makes us more than blood and bone That perches in the soul ******* And sings the tune without the words And never stops at all. Copyright@smithavishwanathsblog.com. All Rights Reserved. P.S. I wrote the poem in couplets- each couplet from a different poem. Below are the poets and poems from which I took the lines. *Morning Poem by Mary Oliver ** Wild Geese by Mary Oliver *** The Thing is by Ellen Bass ****All you who sleep tonight- Vikram Seth *****Harlem by Langston Hughes ******Dark Sonnet by Neil Gaiman ******* "Hope" is the thing with feathers by Emily Dickinson
Some of us, hopefully, will keep in touch, some of us will not. But, before I end, I want to thank each one of you whose acquaintance I made- you made the journey sweeter. Wishing all of you a blessed rest of the year.
Until we meet again,
Farewell
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