Words are bread crumbs through a forest… We Write Poems’ Prompt #80 encouraged us to accumulate a minimum of 12 words and to write little two-line “poemlets” with each one. I chose my words by closing my eyes and randomly putting my finger on different pages of a book. The words were: shoulders, breeze, stopped, grass, floated, home, grinning, grimly, daughter, butter, remember, window
An old tree sprawled against the sky,
a daughter in the yard, with a bucket collecting snow.
Like black flames the cypresses rise
into white: within the frame, a window, and within, a traveler.
Breeze, a word deliberately rhyming with ease,
void of meaning on the labels of cleaning products.
The creases of maps, of pages in diaries,
of ironed shirts, faces, shoulder blades
In the dirt, an eternally grinning blond doll
with uniform teeth and knobbly knees
A train. A bus. A bird making v’s, a house,
a home, the corner where the rocking horse rocked.
Your task is to remember these random images,
decipher the code, spell it back under the darkness of your eyelids
He stopped counting at ten, forgetting
how the numbers continued, and why he had started
A blade of grass, a fisted heart, and all other poetic things,
waiting to hear what is being said about them
We were sixteen, in the bathtub floated
a bouquet of decaying roses from her last birthday
In the time it takes to butter the bread,
the slant widens, the image sharpens, buds close.
A sentence spoken grimly could become something more
than a question answered without the reading of lips
mabel lee 