NaPoWriMo April (Day 3): The land of make-believe

 
For the month of April, I’m writing a poem a day from prompts on https://www.napowrimo.net. You can click on the headlines (Day One, etc) to view/add comments. There’s also a list of participants’ sites below the site header, so you can read their poems.

Day 3

Today, our featured online magazine is Rust and Moth, which has been publishing quarterly since 2008. You can browse all of their past issues here.  From their newest issue, I’ll point out Leah Claire Kaminski’s lyrical “Flung Girl,” and Lucia Owen’s moving “The Gardener’s Prayer.”
And now for our (optional) prompt. This one is a bit complex, so I saved it for a Sunday. It’s a Spanish form called a “glosa” – literally a poem that glosses, or explains, or in some way responds to another poem. The idea is to take a quatrain from a poem that you like, and then write a four-stanza poem that explains or responds to each line of the quatrain, with each of the quatrain’s four lines in turn forming the last line of each stanza. Traditionally, each stanza has ten lines, but don’t feel obligated to hold yourself to that!
 
My four chosen lines from ‘Flung Girl’:
Last summer I walked on someone else’s ground.
When I was small, and the world was flat.
I would crouch at the edge of the yard and the forest.
Bundle myself in warm skin and chlorophyll.

 
The land of make-believe
 
There are strings attached with everything we do,
invisible lines we cannot see, but they are there still,
dangling in the air, resurrecting make-believe, and so
we carry on as usual, not noticing things echoing us.
The misty moonlight doesn’t care if anyone’s watching,
the stars still twinkle even though there is a spy,
and all I recall is the one time I confessed that
last summer I walked on someone else’s ground.
 
We are different to the image we feed to the world,
the reflection staring back from the looking glass.
We don’t stop to talk to strangers on the walk here,
fearing any stress, seeking the introvert inside.
Childhood seems a safety net a long, long while ago,
lost in the sanctitude of hot summers and joyful games,
a time of learning and marking our growth on a wall.
That time when I was small, and the world was flat.
 
To push our bikes up the steepest hill could take an hour,
just so that we could fly down in a minute’s streak.
Those buttercup days lasted twice as long as adult hours,
but it was all too soon 6pm and time to go in.
Growing up takes longer than the 18 years we’re given.
We’re works in progress, learning as we’re living.
Exploration was our middle name and we explored –
I would crouch at the edge of the yard and the forest.
 
I’m still at peace in the woods I find myself in,
wandering free among dank smells and green sights,
the peeking daffodils and scattered cracking twigs.
I only wish for a string of golden lights to guide me,
To bathe in the fantasy that I’m in a faery land,
hunting for a secret portal into the world below,
where there is only love and warmth, and I’d
bundle myself in warm skin and chlorophyll.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 3, 2020