Prompted by Emily

     A few years ago, I received a newsletter from a poetry site in which were listed several exercises a poet could try when experiencing writer's block. One of the exercises was this: take a line from a favorite poem as the opening line of your own, then use one word (or more) from that line in every succeeding line. You can use the same word, or choose different words.

     Sounded pretty simple to me. So I decided to use a line from Emily Dickinson that I love a lot. The result is this little lyric, written in heroic couplets.

Prompted by Emily

"My wars are laid away in Books—," she said.
And in the books I've written or have read,

the wars that I have witnessed or have fought
are laid with ghosts I've fled and ghosts I've sought.

I laid away my books before the wars
were fairly won, before my battle scars

were barely formed, and put them far away
from less destructive wars of Everyday.

The wars I've laid away are numberless,
but ghosts are never really laid to rest.


© Leticia Austria 2010
First published in Decanto

Drought (and I Don't Just Mean the Weather)

     It is the first of August; 2012 is two-thirds gone. And I have written exactly two new poems so far this year. Two. This, from someone who, four years ago, wrote nine poems in August alone. Not that any or all of them were gems, mind you. I relegated most of them to my "reject" file, to be picked over some day in search of an odd phrase or two that might be salvaged. But at least I was creating.

     I've been through dry spells before, but nothing like this. Not only is my muse temporarily (one hopes) paralyzed; I haven't even been motivated to send anything out to editors. I haven't sent anything out in a year. My last poem in print came out this past April -- which was only four months ago, but it feels like fourteen.

     During another dry spell about two years ago, a friend of mine who writes the odd poem between raising her children and singing in the chorus at HGO, gave me a first line prompt to get me started on a new one. This was the result:

          DROUGHT

          Upon a jagged precipice, I stand
          poised, parched, a poet's heart in hand,
          beneath me, withered brook and furrowed land.

          There was a time not long ago, the grass
          swayed, surged, an undulating mass
          that fissured where the fleeter-footed passed.

          There was a time not long ago, I stood
          poised, plied, surrounded by its good,
          behind me, siskins singing in the wood.

         © Leticia Austria 2010. First published in Decanto.

     I might just ask my friend to toss me another prompt. Who knows, it might produce a decent poem and chip me out of this sand trap onto the green, or at least the fairway. "Oh, Kelley ... !"