Really! That tree, in saying its crashing farewell left all that plaster in the closet. And all those piles of old clothes, damp books, and stuff saved, stuff that once had life but life has moved on. Really it is time to sort it and pass it along to someone for whom it will be almost as good as new. But I don’t want to think of that now.
I want to think about a “golden shovel” poem. At Hamline this summer, Marilyn Nelson introduced us to this poetic form. In it, the writer takes a line from a favorite poem (e.g. “Whose woods these are I think I know”) and uses each word in that line to end a line of poetry of the writer’s own creation. So the new poem would look like this–
……………………………………….. whose
……………………………………….. woods
……………………………………….. these
…
……………………………………….. know.
Maybe this is the writing equivalent of quilting–making something new from pieces of something existing. And it’s a kind of play. In the middle of the closet, in the middle of the mess, on my way to Maine, it’s time for play. I hope you’ll have time to play with the “golden shovel,” too.
