Monday Poetry Prompt

This week’s prompt: petition to be inconsolable

Laure-Anne Bosselaar wrote this wonderful poem by the same title. The speaker just didn’t want to be comforted that day and listed 14 woes.

Write down your woes, doesn’t have to be exactly 14. List the little everyday things and the big heartbreaking things that make life a little harder. And maybe by writing them down they lose some of their weight.

Happy Writing!

‘Petition to be Inconsolable’
by Laure-Anne Bosselaar (from Small Gods of Grief)

Listen to this: rationalism –
what an ugly word, heady with the sagacious
rational, insufferably suffixed with ism.

I ban it from my vocabulary,
from the only thesaurus I trust:
the abridged one I protect when I make

a fist against my chest, the same fist
I brandish to the fourteen slats of the blinds
I slammed down just now

to stop staring at that immutable
mountain in which I know how to find
consolation, but don’t want to tonight.

I petition to be inconsolable
for today’s fourteen sorrows – one per slat:

four a cloud at dawn tearing its heart out
trying to obscure the sun;

for that beech branch on Sprint Street
whipped to shreds by each passing truck;

for the gardens I planted, then left;

for the photograph of my dead friend
buckling more each day on the fridge door;

for the three times I stumbled today,

for  my lubberly body,

the shame of it;

for the fist inside my chest

and for raising it, still, against my father;

for his shame of me;

for the shame of him
in me;

for  spurning consolation
with fourteen slammed slats;

for another day of dying

and for welcoming this – against all reason.