Poetry Stretch Results - Prefix Poems

The challenge this week was to use a prefix to form a series of words and then write a poem around them. Here are the rather spectacular results.

Julie Larios of The Drift Record shares a poem entitled Pre of the Fixed.

Jane Yolen left this poem in the comments.

OVER

--lay

When my beloved husband died,
And after I cried
For a thousand days,
Making myself unhappier
In a thousand ways
I realized that the problem
Was neither warmth nor sex,
But that like that turtle
“Twixt plated decks,”
I have no one to lie over
Or under me.
That fact alone
Practically sundered me.

--mantle

Looking into the mirror
A year after his death,
I saw an old woman
with eyes like shallows:
cold, inhospitable,
covered with rime.
I shall get to know her
In time.

--come

We shall,
I shall,
Make a life,
Not a better,
Not a wife,
But a new
And fierce
Alone.
What was two
Is now
Quite
One.

© 2009 Jane Yolen, all rights reserved

Laura Purdie Salas left this poem in the comments.

circum-

be
circum-
spect
don’t dive in
to that hole.
is there a bottom?

circum-
navigate
instead.
black.
endless.
peer in,
gasping.
scrabble back from the edge.

circum-
locution
may be the only
way around the
unanswerable
question.
drown it in words
larger than the hole
itself obliterating
its unknowableness.

study the
circum-
ference
of the
question.
is it
pi times
the d(ying)
all around you.
the dying that
you fear?

circum-
scribe
your thoughts,
defined
within
walls of words,
borders of phrases,
continents of
poems.

--Laura Purdie Salas, all rights reserved

Susan Taylor Brown of Susan Writes finally joined us for a stretch! Hurray! (and Welcome!) Her poem is entitled SEMI.

Kate Coombs of Book Aunt left this poem in the comments.

The Sorcerer Chants

Tera
It twists like fire
in my mouth: sands pour
into glass and mass,
demanding the spell-shape.

Peta
I aim the word
like an arrow with eyes
and magic hisses
the name of every star.

Exa
Thought trembles down
the bones of mountains.
My incantation
rises like a golem.

Zetta
I leave behind silences,
as if I were dragging
a thin, jagged tail
through the dust.

Yotta
It isn't enough to tell
the size of the darkness
I have bloomed
into being like a new flower.

—Kate Coombs

Linda of Write Time shares a poem entitled UN.

Here is one of the poems I wrote for this stretch.

Sub

-divide
Cleave attention
halve time
part ways
our days are
split and split and split

-atomic
It’s really all about
the little things
the tiny
bits and pieces of
our lives

-ordinate
I am
so small
so insignificant
so meaningless
in the grand scheme
of things

-sist
still …
I
am
here

It's not too late if you still want to play. Leave me a note about your poem and I'll add it to the list.