#NaPoWriMo 2022 Day Twenty-eight

Cataracts
milky    white 
film       covers
lens    over    pupil
focus       dulls
stealing     your
Eyesight

                                        

NaPoWriMo Prompt – Today’s (optional) prompt is to write a concrete poem. Like acrostic poems, concrete poems are a favorite for grade-school writing assignments, so this may not be your first time at the concrete-poem rodeo. In brief, a concrete poem is one in which the lines are shaped in a way that mimics the topic of the poem. For example, May Swenson’s poem “Women” mimics curves, reinforcing the poem’s references to motion, rocking horses, and even the shape of a woman’s body. George Starbuck’s “Sonnet in the Shape of a Potted Christmas Tree” is – you guessed it – a sonnet in the shape of a potted Christmas tree. Your concrete poem could be complexly-shaped, but relatively simple strategies can also be “concrete” —  like a poem involving a staircase where the length of the lines grows or shrinks over time, like an ascending (or descending) set of stairs.

Good morning and welcome to day twenty-eight of napowrimo where I attempt to create a defective eyeball not sure I nailed this one, but I know how time consuming and tricky shape poems can be.

   Tea Time

 

                                              h                Kettle on
                                                 o        I remember tea      M 
                                                    t   pouring water into         i
                                                          cups set to steep           l
                                                          stir in sugar and      k

My first time participating in napowrimo (2010) Tea Time turned into a tea kettle. And the first poem of mine Melanie accepted at Silver Birch Press was a concrete poem –
Monsoon Season

Neither of these poems came to be without a lot of editing. Today I was trying to design an actual eye, but nothing I had seemed to be working so I went with a simple eyeball. I wanted it to be more rounded like an actual ball, but then I realized I have an astigmatism so my eyeball isn’t perfectly round, right? And the strike through hopefully lends to how hard it is to see with cataracts. Okay I just asked Gretchen and she affirmed it looks like an eyeball – Eye of Sauron. But at least it’s eye shape.

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