Today the Poetic Asides prompt spoke to me with the suggestion to write a things said or unsaid poem. I always think of secluded spots in nature as the best places to hear our own thoughts, which is probably what inspired this:

 

On the Lake

 

It makes him feel insignificant

and that’s his favourite thing about it.

How he might patter off into the underbrush,

rove the shadowed spaces between the spruce.

 

When he’s on the lake, those first minutes

after dawn, the surface so still and solid,

he believes it can support

every weighty worry.

 

All the things he never says,

known by the glimmering water.

 

 

Today the  NaPoWriMo site puts out the call to get clever with a “kenning” poem, which is  a riddle made up of several lines of kennings (usually two-word descriptors in a unique or old language) to describe something or someone.

At This Is Not A Literary Journal the assignment is to take an imagined trip to a place that scares you, then write about it. As poets I think we naturally write about our fears, and as readers we’re drawn to the exploration of those fears. It helps us cope and heal. And sometimes it makes for such beautiful poems, like Seamus Heaney’s “Anything Can Happen.”