NaPoWriMo 2022 was a fun month of writing, so for May I’m
using the prompts from April 2021’s NaPoWriMo
to write poems.
I call this prompt “Return to
Spoon River,” after Edgar Lee Masters’ eminently creepy 1915 book Spoon River Anthology.
The book consists of well over 100 poetic monologues, each spoken by a person
buried in the cemetery of the fictional town of Spoon River, Illinois. Today,
I’d like to challenge you to write your own poem in the form of a monologue
delivered by someone who is dead. Not a famous person, necessarily – perhaps a
remembered acquaintance from your childhood, like the gentleman who ran the
shoeshine stand, or one of your grandmother’s bingo buddies. As with Masters’
poems, the monologue doesn’t have to be a recounting of the person’s whole
life, but could be a fictional remembering of some important moment, or
statement of purpose or philosophy. Be as dramatic as you like – Masters
certainly didn’t shy away from high emotion in writing his poems.
We all walk
through the fire sometime,
when the
days are too hazardous,
too long,
too cruel, too jaded,
too
something we can’t deal with,
but we all
have our own small gathering
of friends
and family, and pets,
an assembly
of all we love,
whom we can
refer to as home.
even the
Tarot cards won’t tell us how,
and so we
try to live well and positively,
sticking to
our ethics and inner compass,
treating
others as we’d be treated,
and making
the most of a timeless day,
seeking out
the good and lighthearted,
trying to
avoid the grim and overdone.
watching the
birds flit to and fro,
remembering
when I was just a small boy,
and the
summers seemed endlessly fine,
filled with
bike trips and conversation,
new
adventures and places to discover,
until we
were called in by our mothers
to wash our
hands and eat our tea.
and I
travelled long before sleeping here.
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