I was reading a post over at NWPStudio as someone was sharing a prose poem, and it sparked a story in my head. I sat with it for a few weeks, and then, I came across another prose poem in a book I was reading about poetry — Poetry Unbound by Padraig O’ Tuama — and the idea stirred again.
Prose poems are tricky, I think, because they might seem to surface as story, but need to have poetic elements woven into the fabric. Here, I tried to do that with some phrasing but also, the call and response of a conversation with myself, with memory of childhood the heart of the words.
I am still not sure it really worked, and I went through a handful of design choices for what/how I wanted the poem to look, from one huge block of text and font choices, to smaller pieces, broken apart, to this final version, where the response lines are their own lines, giving a little more weight to those words.
Peace (and poems),
Kevin