Metaphorically Speaking

Welcome to Day 5 of NaPoWriMo/GloPoWriMo and the Sunday Weekly edition for those who only pop by once a week to see what poetry has been cooked up in Corrogue. Over April I will be posting daily, using the prompts from http://www.napowrimo.net/ who have set a fiendish prompt this morning that is doomed to an epic fail. (See point 20.) We have been asked to incorporate “Twenty Little Things.” There was a point this morning where I nearly gave up the effort. But I have a stubborn, dogged streak, so I trundled on. Then I could say, “it’s done!” I can get on with other things today – like baking some cookies, or cutting back brambles. (We have an acre in West Cavan and it’s spring planting time. But there are also lots of wild features on the place to encourage wildlife, but the blackberries have to be tamed on health and safety, slip and trip grounds!)

Anyway- these were the parameters of the “Twenty Little Things” prompt. If you care to count up how many I did cram in to the poem, you are welcome. I gave up!

Begin the poem with a metaphor.

Say something specific but utterly preposterous.

Use at least one image for each of the five senses, either in succession or scattered randomly throughout the poem.

Use one example of synesthesia (mixing the senses).

Use the proper name of a person and the proper name of a place.

Contradict something you said earlier in the poem.

Change direction or digress from the last thing you said.

Use a word (slang?) you’ve never seen in a poem.

Use an example of false cause-effect logic.

Use a piece of talk you’ve actually heard (preferably in dialect and/or which you don’t understand).

Create a metaphor using the following construction: “The (adjective) (concrete noun) of (abstract noun) . . .”

Use an image in such a way as to reverse its usual associative qualities.

Make the persona or character in the poem do something he or she could not do in “real life.”

Refer to yourself by nickname and in the third person.

Write in the future tense, such that part of the poem seems to be a prediction.

Modify a noun with an unlikely adjective.

Make a declarative assertion that sounds convincing but that finally makes no sense.

Use a phrase from a language other than English.

Make a non-human object say or do something human (personification).

Close the poem with a vivid image that makes no statement, but that “echoes” an image from earlier in the poem.

Happy writing! (They said brightly at the end of the post!)

Hah! That’s not how I would have described it! I really want to see who has actually got all of them in the featured poem on the site tomorrow. They have more fortitude than I.

Metaphorically Speaking
 
Love is a caterpillar
that wants to be a butterfly
as it trundles along all hungry,
woolly and fuzzy, 
longing
to say goodbye
to its sluggish locomotive
state, because
 
love wants to have its wings,
to coast on gentle thermals
in sunshine, 
to sup on scented roses,
on bee's leftover nectar in a fragrant tea,
most probably, 
exhilarated,
because
 
Love has the memory
of the crackle
in the moment
when the pupa snapped open.
Its surprise,
the shock
of being out of its
body,
because that was what 
it
had always wished for.
Though 
 
love is really only in it
for the eggs.
Or so Woody Allen said 
long ago
in voiceover at the end
of Annie Hall.
 
Love is the egg of its eye.
Also, the drag and the crawl,
the cocoon and the shelter,
wings 
and fleet connection.
Love lays the egg
of its own 
transmutation
 
and it will do so over and over,
again and again –
crawl, cling, fly, light,
die,
because 

we are all really
Sumatran butterflies
fluttering
raucous chaos
across the air waves
rippling across the planet,
gently leading us
in a mad tango.

 
Copyright © Bee Smith, 2020. All rights reserved.