Yes. Last night's session of Creative Writing class was dedicated to poetry and Shauna (Paull, our teacher) said, "At the end of this class you will all have a poem. A 6 line poem". Well, we did.
We actually did two writing exercises. The first one, to just "get going" and I was a little skeptical at first, but it turned out kind of funny. OK. I wouldn't say that it's a poem, but it made me write for 5 minutes straight without putting the pen down -wait, I sipped some coffee as I had had a really long day so I needed caffeine at 8 pm- but still, I wrote for 5 minutes and came up with something relatively coherent. She suggested that we use "I wish", "I wonder", "Once" or "Now" to start a list of things, feelings, etc and that some lines could turn into something, some others would just get discarded. That's one of my problems. I have a hard time letting go of things that I've written. And sometimes, when I go back to first versions of something or a piece that I wrote that I might not have liked at the time I wrote it, I like it and something comes out of it, so my own lesson of the day:
never throw out any words away.
The second exercise actually produced the poem. It is interesting -long to explain and I'm too tired tonight so won't go there- but I was frowning and groaning not thinking too much of it and all the other ladies in the class and Shauna liked it. She made a couple of tiny edits and when I read it again, it kind of got me. So here it is:
Breathe deeply, look up at the sky, listen to the silence, scream with the crows, then run...
forming the wings of our imagination, holding a pen, caressing the mind
but not in this corner, my home, I cannot see in this light
only to tie a knot again to the ground, to the sky, to the earth
and shadows of mountains, trees, rivers and rocks
to discover what lies ahead, a path to follow, a mount to climb
a journey with no end.
