Okay, the weekend was a little wild and unpredictable--from wiping out comments to not letting me post any prompts (and then eventually posting multiple prompts). Hopefully, we can get back to a little normalcy for the final week or so of poeming. Time to make a stand.
No, really, the prompt today is to write a poem that takes a stand. This could be a political stand, religious stand, personal stand, or I guess a poem about the ability to stand--or setting up a stand (think vegetable stand or newspaper stand, etc.). Whatever your thing, be sure to take a poetic stand today.
Do you hear me?
I won't have it!
Put the walls back.
I said - put them back!
Put the walls back
Put them back!
and on them their shingles, the vines and the roses
and on them the books
and in them the phrases
the lucky, lucky time
in which we could underline
there it is. said so well, oh, i must keep that
somewhere
underline.
remember.
Put them back - the bricks
Why in god's name did you disrupt
the bricks
and tear down the writer's house
and bury the well
without a marker
and fold
the books and the bricks and the garden
-bulbs trying-
hearth and basement
games and pots
into the scooped up mattress and the glass
from our photos
from time, sometime, frozen like that
and the trees
you terrible men
can you not hear their old roots ripping
can you not understand that as pain
belching, brutal, practical men
And you others
thieves -
put them back
the candlesticks
fine but too expensive
bought on the day we looked through
the windows at the diamonds
fancy
and had all we could need
and the guitar that played
later to keep us alive
give them back
put them back
the walls and their pain
and their weather and their sea-scent
the stairs and its calendars
its thumping children grown old
the floorboards and it the sounds
of nightwalkers
those needing water
or touch or talk in the dark
or to know
is someone else home
in these walls
three centuries old
and the ghosts
first, above all
primary occupants
contained only in those walls
by those walls alone
you bulldozed to dust before lunch
you dumb, limited, unlovely men
you didn't even see them go -
or feel them pass through your bowels
like the truth of your thin, brief life
they, more essential than
the phrases in the books
the yellow of the rainslickers
the crust for the pies
the pillows - soft for dreaming
the address books of friends
some crossed off
gone somewhere
you did this -
you
find the ghosts
put the walls back
put them back
then put them back
to haunt us all
to warn us of impermanence
of being stuck somewhere
in a condition we could never understand
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