Today’s NaPoWriMo.net prompt challenged writers to create a poem inspired by an entry from the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. The entries are very vivid, but the sorrows do have potential to strike a chord, or even get you thinking about defining an in-between, minor, haunting feeling that you have, and that does not yet have a name.

The “sorrow” that first jumped out at me was lachesism. The poem is still a work-in-progress, I think, so I’m not posting. But the definition itself is beautifully crafted.

lachesism

n. the desire to be struck by disaster—to survive a plane crash, to lose everything in a fire, to plunge over a waterfall—which would put a kink in the smooth arc of your life, and forge it into something hardened and flexible and sharp, not just a stiff prefabricated beam that barely covers the gap between one end of your life and the other.