Week 7
In which we may be feeling a bit exhausted
Welcome to The Public Domain Poetry Project where we deconstruct an older poem by using each line (one per week) as a jumping off point for a brand new poem. Participants are encouraged to share their poems in the comments below, or to leave us a link so we can read them elsewhere. If this sounds like fun to you, please consider subscribing for free so you don’t miss next week’s prompt. Thanks for visiting!
It’s Week 7 here at The Public Domain Poetry Project. We’ve passed the halfway point now and are heading into the second half of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Travel.”
Journeys have a rhythm, don’t you find? Most trips start out with excitement and enthusiasm. New adventures are just around the corner, new sights, new sounds, new smells. It’s simple at the beginning. But somewhere around the midway point it’s easy to stumble. On family vacations when my kids were younger, we came to call it “The Homesick Day.” It was that day when everybody’s energy started to flag, squabbles cropped up too easily, and we were all missing our own beds.
The kids are older now, but I notice the same pattern when we travel. I think the best way to deal with Homesick Day is to dial back the pace, spend more time lounging at the rental, take naps. I think it’s mostly about rest and fatigue. Travel is exciting, but it also takes extra energy and we’re not alway aware of how depleted we’ve become when we are distracted by the wonders of a new place.
I’ve felt a bit overwhelmed this week. I’ve been busy at work, busy cleaning up after multiple snow and ice storms, busy keeping up with The February Poetry Adventure, and my regular weekly posts at Poetical. To say nothing of the turmoil in the world. For me, this week has been my Homesick Day. So instead of trying to come up with a clever device or structure for how to respond to this week’s prompt, I did something a little different. I read the line once and then put it away. I didn’t try to use the line intact, I just started writing on the themes that first reading sparked for me. Then, when I was finished, I went back and tried to make sure I’d included all the words in the line, not in any particular order. I think I managed it, but if I didn’t that’s okay, too.
A weekly prompt response doesn’t seem like a big commitment at the outset. But like all journeys, there’s a point were it feels like a bit of a slog. If that’s where you are, give yourself some grace and do what feels right.
One last note- this coming Saturday, February 22, is Edna St. Vincent Millay’s birthday. She was born into this season of snow and ice and frigid temperatures on the coast of Maine. Because of The February Poetry Adventure, I’ve come to think of this as Poetry Month, although I know in the US it is celebrated in April. But knowing our featured poet was born during February makes this feel like just right month to be hunkered down writing our way through the cold and darkness, both real and metaphorical. Thanks for being here.
But I see its cinders red on the sky
Things Are Not Always What They Seem
The fire can be burning
So hot, so hot
red, orange, and green
swirling over blue coals
But if you tilt
your chin up, dear
and look to the sky
you would only see
the memory of cinders,
the flakes of ash swirling
into the night sky
and falling back again
like so many snowflakes
forced upward by a gust
and then making their way
to the ground, which was
always their intent
If you only looked
upward, dear, you could
mistake for peace
a conflagration so fierce
it would devour
you and me and the world
if we stood too close
See you in the comments!
Oh yes. Every trip has a homesick day! If only you could predict which day it would be and plan accordingly. The best thing seems to be to just plan to have some days spent quietly being not doing and dole them out as needed.
I might write something more on the prompt, but my first impulse was to record a vignette seen out my window last night at sunset:
on a pale parchment sky
blue-gray clouds puff and whirl
there, one is catching fire at the edge
a red smudge, an escaped cinder
My first fire
.
But I see its cinders red on the sky
-Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Travel”
.
There was a fire. That should surprise no one.
But I had never seen one, never seen a house on fire
never seen the trucks pull up, one by one, the red of them
lining the narrow hill down from our apartment.
.
We stood on the sidewalk with the others, watching
orange light reach to the sky, snapping against the stars.
My roommate was a police chief’s daughter
marching down to ask if there was something we could do
if someone needed help. She carried a blanket with her.
.
I wasn’t brave like that. I just stood and watched, worrying
about babies wrapped in blue blankets, grabbed by blackened arms
from the heart of the fire. In the cartoons, death could be evaded
at the last second. I didn’t know then that you could swallow smoke
.
that the damage to your lungs could change your inner landscape
turning it all pitch, turning the pink charred,
death without burning
still fire death.