Day 29 NaPoWriMo/GloPoWriMo finds me on Day 5 of my sojourn in southwest England. We are in Glastonbury with the festival of Beltane imminent. The prompt for today asks us to play with the Plath Poetry Project. Choose one of that site’s posted Sylvia Plath poems and respond. After a quick perusal I opted for Little Fugue.
Little Fugue at Glastonbury Abbey
The fallen magnolia blossom
Blistered by beastly north wind
Flesh shrivelled in infancy
This changeling season
It should be hirsute Green Man
And nude bathing at the well
I could thwack, thwack, thwack
At Old Frosty myself
With my old lady walking stick
For all the white vapour
Exuding from my breath
The cloud overhead
Nearly May and this is it
Woolen mittens a long stretch from
The white cotton of ladies summer gloves
Really more the season to huddle
Over in the hive of the Abbot’s kitchen
Warming at all four fires
And Brigid! You there on the white walls
In St. Patrick’s Chapel,
Why are you hanging on here?
The white of your snowdrops
Long since gone, but winter
Its’ prison pallour clinging on, clinging on
Beyond the time for cream to adorn the thorn
It’s barely flaunting a petticoat’s hem
To tempt any virile Green Men
Copyright 2018 Bee Smith
For my fellow sojourners Pat, Dawn and Anthony
