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: MISFIT

Some associations: fish out of water, square peg in a round hole, conspicuous, poorly adapted, maladapted, outsider, bohemian, counterculturist, deviant, free spirit, heretic, iconoclast, individualist, lone wolf, nonconformist, character, crackpot, eccentric, freak, oddball, aberrant, anomaly, doesn’t belong, unsuitable, Island of Misfit Toys

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Poem:

Remembered Habitat

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there. — Rumi

The out-beyond field is where I rest and
when I’m outside it I’m searching,
yearning, mapping it and trailing it,
remembering it, then finding, unveiling it,
so close I overlooked it, again:
there is no outside.

The field,
purple plenty, rolling red clover,
spready mints roving, reckless wild rye and
thriftless ferns, open-faced daisies,
heal-all approving, and poppies for sleep,
sleep, unsticking duplicities like sleep
and wake, then and now,
inside, outside.

The field,
sometimes found meadow, marsh, moorland,
a verging truce for what’s dismembered within,
a grounding consolation,
flourishing allies surrounding,
nodding, harmonising yes
in a riot of breeze, an extravagant ease
unbounded by any outside, herein
this fathomless everywhere borderland.

©MMWms 2019

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