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: WILD

Some associations: wild card, wild west, wild blue yonder, wild goose chase, in the wild, wild child, wild oats, wildflower, wildcat strike, Wild Strawberries (Bergman film), walk on the wild side, Born to be Wild, Oscar Wilde, sow wild oats, spread like wildfire, Where the Wild Things Are, Call of the Wild, wild at heart, barbarian, free, native, natural, overrun, savage, fierce, neglected, overgrown, unbroken, uncivilized, uncultivated, undomesticated, uninhabited, feral, wayward, wild horses couldn’t drag me away

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Poem:

Carousel

Hold on tight!

This restless ride,
teeters, lurches,
wobbles over terrain
familiar and strange,
strange and familiar,
ceaseless circling spin,

both hurried and unhurried,
like dreams that recur and
remind you of something:
themselves;
a lost home, reinvented;
a childhood wish, unrecovered.

Hold on tight!

Unstable ground, broken, lifting,
flying fast without crux,
cockeyed cosmology
transforming the starry whirl.

First you see a woman in blue,
watching you, and then her eyes
vanish and you see
a blue woman, yourself,
half hidden in shadow.

This didn’t really happen
but it’s true.

At night your dreams feel solid,
though they shift and blur,
kaleidoscope space and time,
escape the gravity of your thinking mind
and leave you tumbling away from the ground,
clutching at air,

where there is nothing to hold on to,
only your own hand,
which you imagine
is gripping the reins,
steadying the shimmer,
shaping the story,

but it’s just as untethered,
just as unearthed,
as you are.

©MMWms 2010/2019

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