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Poetry Prompts

Monday Poetry Prompt

For this week’s prompt: write an imitation poem to Lorca’s poem ‘Death’.

ImitationYou could only imitate the form or the topic or the highly associative approach to a difficult topic or you could stay very close to the poem and write your highly associative version of a Death poem in the same structure. Have fun!

Death
by Federico Garcia Lorca; translated by Robert Bly
    So much effort!
Effort the horse makes to be a dog!
Effort the dog makes to be a swallow!
Effort the swallow makes to be a bee!
Effort the bee makes to be a horse!
And the horse,
what a sharp arrow it presses out of the rose!
What a gray rose it lifts up from its teeth!
And the rose,
what a mob of lights and barks
it ties into the living sugar of its tree trunk!
As for the sugar,
what tiny daggers it dreams of while awake!
And the tiny daggers,
what a moon without mangers, what naked bodies –
with skin eternal and blushing – they look and look for!
And I, when I am on the roof,
what a pure seraphim of fire I want to be and I am!
But this plaster arch,
how immense it is, how invisible, how tiny,
no effort at all.
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