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: INJURED

Some associations: damaged, harmed, hurt, accident, hold harmless, add insult to injury, the injured party, wounded, oppressed, wronged, pained, broken, suffering, casualties, dinged, imperfect, defective, maimed, mangled, mutilated, battered, incapacitated, bruised, disabled,  fractured, deformed, scarred, on the DL, black-and-blue 

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Poem

Augury

They hit the windows with force,
though I have taken convenient steps to prevent it.
Most fly away, but they can’t live long so damaged,
so stunned by our breezy building of these
implacable nests, stamped and banded
with a glittering betrayal of glass, cunning call
of delicate air, splash of fatal light,
vivid blur on the way to perfect lucid blue.

And if they survive for now they will carry always
anyway the wounds of their collision with our world,
their blazing field mark a calloused signal,
their fluttering flight an abandoned escape.

© MMWms 2019

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