weekly prompts to spur us to write poetry
Lethe (prompt #3)
Lethe
The swings are Olympus,
The sandbox is Troy.
(I'll be Zeus, as always.)
The plummeting joy
Of flight and of leaping
The crest of the arc,
The story unspooling
Well into the dark.
We're pirates. This stick
Is my flintlock, rapier
This willow switch--
No, let's play musketeers!
(I'm Athos, and you be
Whoever you want.)
Our cloaks will billow
With grace nonchalant,
Our horses will gallop
In furious chase,
As far as the power
Substation -- for days! --
For duty, and honor
A hero receives.
We'll pay for our journey
With willow leaves
Like silvery fishes,
With plantain to heal
All grievous wounds,
Both imagined and real.
This dead moth we found
We'll gravely inter
With satin rose petals
Surrounding her
In this matchbox coffin,
Her gravestone a shard
Of cobalt blue bottle
And torn playing card,
There under the cherries,
Where secrets are stored.
A ball has been called in
The flower-doll court.
We'll pick out a headdress
Of daisy or phlox,
And perm in a puddle
Their dandelion locks,
With bright malva gowns
And apple-leaf capes,
Affairs and gossip
And daring escapes
Await. And tomorrow
It all starts again,
And memory lingers
Like tatterwort stain:
Adventures and monsters,
Apartment block myths,
The summer days grow,
The stories grow with:
Ephemeral magic,
Like cottonwood fluff,
But backyard-wrought wonder
Was wonder enough.
The spellwork unravels,
The evening grows late,
But in dreams still will hover
The games that we played.




So funny! Love the I and you statements! I think I remember you mentioning that grave, that coffin and the cobalt blue bottle (um, yes, I remember that visit you mentioned to Tolkien's grave, too, but that's another story from a far into the future)... Definitely love the playfulness of this piece! :-)
LOL, I continue to be deeply impressed by all the random stuff you remember from my ramblings from 20 years ago XD (and, yes, there was also a visit to Tolkien's grave, which come to think of it has the same feeling of a make-believe quest as some of those childhood games XD)
This was such a fun prompt, and it reminded me of a lot of things from the 'yard' that I hadn't thought about in years, which is just perfect. And I learned a new word looking up the names of some plants I only knew in Russian, which is a side benefit, I guess :)
Oh, and on the topic of "I" and "you" statements -- I can't remember if it was from an earlier year, but if not -- do you remember the Myriad submission poem that started "Come play with me and be my bud]And we'll be cows and chew our cud"? (it was a parody of Marlowe's "Come live with me and be my love", of course, and I still remember a fair number of lines from it till now -- it was such a cute poem, and it was in the back of my mind while writing this.
I have forgotten that Myriad submission! Still love the cuteness, though. :-) And yes, the benefits of Google translate, internet image search-and-confirm. I've definitely boosted my bilingual fluency in this day and age.
Ooh, I actually haven't tried doing that through Google Image search, although that is a good idea! My favorite trick for that is Wikipedia -- I look up the Russian term I know, and then go down to the sidebar where it has links to articles in other languages. Almost always English is one of them, and voila'! (although sometimes that can miss nuances.)
Oh nice! I forgot that I sometimes do that too--visit the Wikipedia pages too.