I’m using daily prompts associated with Inktober (artists doing ink drawings) to spur poetry this month. The poems flow from the prompts, though it may not be obvious (at all); and sometimes the poems are revisions of earlier poems that came to mind when I mulled the prompt. If there’s a photo in the post, it was chosen after the poem was written. I’m “showing my work” by offering some of the words, phrases, associations that came to me for each prompt. The poems may or may not have anything to do with gardens, gardening, or “nature” as it’s commonly considered. To see all the poems (once they’re written), check the Inktober landing page.

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Today’s prompt: OVERGROWN

Some associations: covered, overspread with foliage, growing too large, choke, supplant, weedy, excessive, crowded, dense, lush, disordered, overrun, unruly, wild, jungly, messy, productive, prolific, dense, tangled, leafy, luxuriant, untended

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Poem:

Without

Walking the same trail you’ve walked,
let’s see, 38 times before,
according to photo evidence —
and that’s if you took photos each time,
which you may not have done
but you’ll never know,
since a walk without an awakening photo is like
a spring ephemeral, flourishing for a few days,
maybe weeks, then vanished from view —

and walking today, that same trail, here in the fall
with the dark days approaching, you think:
“it seems so different without” —
without lady’s slippers, trilliums,
showy spring blooms that only five months ago
stippled the edges in crimson, pinks, painterly whites,
heralding summer to come.

Walking on, you think, yes, they’ve disappeared
from sight, they’ve withered and even moldered but surely
the woods is not without them. They’re here,
they remain, sunk into their source
below the duff and in the muck, not an absence
but an abiding, the way each moment
evaporates but leaves a vestige to linger
as something missed.

©MMWms 2019

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