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: TREAD

Some associations: traverse (“tread of light”), walk on or along, path, tread water, steps, tread on toes, tread carefully, tread lightly, downtrodden, treadmill, tread softly, fools rush in where angels fear to tread, don’t tread on me, tire tread, retread, footfall, tramp, pace, stride, flatten, squash, railroad track

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Poem (in villanelle form):

Serpentine

Now rasping rock we tread the leading track,
stained ferric, piled and pressured steely chrome,
bedrock erupting, millennia stacked.

The streaky glaucous serpentine bone-back,
shuffle of pearly pewter hardened foam,
now rasping rock we tread the leading track.

Metallic etched, a silvery scrabbled plaque,
bear oak and grass conceal a catacomb,
bedrock erupting, millennia stacked.

Mosaic, contoured scrawling stones ransacked;
sprawling smilax grabbles, snakily roams.
Now rasping rock we tread the leading track.

Burnished slick, lucent stonework leatherback,
these shallow barrens sculpt a chiseled home.
Now rasping rock we tread the leading track,
bedrock erupting, millennia stacked.

©MMWms 2019

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More on my visit to a very cool serpentine barren, Soldiers Delight Natural Environment Area, in Owings Mills, MD, in Oct. 2017. And a small collage of some of the photos.