NaPoWriMo Day 9- 4×4 Raised Bed

I groaned at the prompt from NaPoWriMo Day 9. The dreaded concrete poem! “Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a “concrete” poem – a poem in which the lines and words are organized to take a shape that reflects in some way the theme of the poem. This might seem like a very modernist idea, but poets have been writing concrete poems since the 1600s! Your poem can take a simple shape, like a box or ball, or maybe you’ll have fun trying something more elaborate, like this poem in the shape of a Christmas tree.” Admittedly, the Christmas tree sonnet is very clever.

NaPoWriMo.net also referenced Kirsten Kaschock’s chapbook, Windowboxing. After I had had a few melodramatic inner moments anguishing over the prompt, I remembered my clever gardener husband’s raised beds using the 4×4 internal rotation method. For a two person household, this helps feed us without a glut and makes room for successional sowing. This You Tube should give you an idea of the method for those of you who are gardening curious.

Part of my panic was how I was going to actually format the blasted text. An Adobe Spark template came to my rescue. So today’s poem is embedded in an image.

The featured image is a photo by Vincent Wachowiak on UnSplash.