This blog is devoted to a select group of poets. We're starting with poets from the Ann Arbor area, but, hey, if you're from Detroit, Grand Rapids, Saginaw or the Upper Peninsula, then that is okay, too.
Our goal is to provide you with a prompt every day from which you are to garner inspiration and submit a poem. How to submit will be very easy. Just put your poem or short story in the comments section and hit post. You may not immediately see your post, but it is there under the "Comments" section. You may need to click on "Comments" to see your poem. It is there on another page.
You may need to have a Gmail account to post in the comments section. Most of you do have Gmail, but for those of you that don't it's extremely worthwhile to open up one now! That way you've got a chance to get your work out there in the world.
Today's poem or short story prompt is the word "spring"
Saturday
ReplyDeleteDay 4 of 7: SPRING
[I've decided that I will use this week's prompts to create a 7-part short story. Wish me luck!]
Serendipity. Fate. Karma. Kismet. The Will of God. Call it what you will, my brother's death was a complete breaking of the rules. For thirty-three years, he did what he could to make his way in the world, despite all of his challenges.
He was a slow learner - he got through high school math by doing each problem three times, once with me, then once by himself, then once with me again to see what he did wrong.
He was in poor health. There was something wrong with his lungs -- they never did diagnose it -- and he was always short of breath. He failed at sports and didn't learn to ride a bike until he was twelve.
There's a long list of 'challenges' I could talk about, but that wasn't how Ken came at the world. To him, these were just facts of life. He told me once that the diversity of humankind demanded a range of characters be onstage at any one time. He was doing his part and he was going to do it well. It occurred to me that, if diversity requited balance, somewhere there was a highly-gifted, highly-talented person whining about how unfair the world was. That would balance Ken's unflagging optimism.
His death was stupid. Pointness. Unscripted by whoever or whatever was in charge of this balance he talked about. He was standing on a platform in Germany, waiting for the train. Someone behind him lost her balance and knocked him onto the tracks. No malice, no drama, just a stupid accident.
Our parents took it as well as could be expected, which is to say not well at all. Our sister seemed satisfied with "God calls us home, each in his own time", as if God had pushed the woman who pushed Ken.
ReplyDeleteI went into a year-long spiral of anger and depression. At one point, a few months after it happened, I made a list of other people who deserved to die more than Ken. It was pointless, of course, but I'd filled several pages with names before I could stop myself. Most of them were people I didn't know, identified only as "the guy who told the little girl to 'shut up' on the plane" or "the woman who fired Anne because she was off sick too often."
Most of my anger, though, was at the Gods.
I am not a religious person in the traditional sense. I don't go into a building once a week to plead with the Great Power of the Universe for whatever thing I might want next. But I do have a sense -- like so many others -- that there is Something Going On that is Bigger Than Us.
And I railed against Them / Her / It. Yelled and screamed endlessly, night after night, asking for some reason, some logic, some framework I could use other than "free will" and "accidents happen".
Intellectually, I could actually accept that. But not emotionally.
ReplyDeleteI couldn't focus. I lost my job, I never saw my friends, I retreated into myself. All of my energy was channeled in a single direction: how could I force an answer from the Gods? I was Captain Ahab. I was Kurtz. I was anyone who took it upon himself to wrestle with God.
And I got somewhere.
I actually got somewhere. Several month ago, a letter showed up in my mailbox. I didn't recognize the handwriting and there was no return address.
There was a map and an index card with a single word written in large black letters: SPRING.
The place on the map was a park near my house. I went there and looked around. Picnic tables, swing sets, trees, nothing unusual. After a few minutes, I heard a sound, a low hum. I walked toward it. There was a red ribbon hanging from a tree branch. I stared at it. The hum seemed to be coming from it, or behind it.
"You want an answer?" a voice boomed. I jumped and spun around. There was nobody there. "Do you want an answer?"
I yelled "YES!" to nobody in particular.
Nothing. No reply. No sound.
The humming had stopped. I looked around, everything was the same. I'd dreamed or hallucinated the whole thing. I looked at the index card. The word SPRING was gone, now there was YES on one side and NO on the other.
I stared at YES, looked around, stared at it again.
"Are you certain?" the voice asked again.
That was the point at which I should have walked away. That was when I should have realized that it wasn't the Gods at all but some infernal trickster. Some malevolent force taking advantage of my grief and rage.
But none of that occurred to me. I was lost in my fantasy that this was the Universe somehow granting me my wish for clarity.
"Yes! I'm certain!" I yelled into the wind.
"Then go."
I saw flashing lights and everything around me vanished. When my vision cleared I was in a small village in what looked like South America. I was standing outside the hut of a shaman, he was inside healing a young boy's headache. He had no answers for me.
I've been springing back and forth across time and space ever since...