NaPoWriMo Day 18: Listening to our shadow

NaPoWriMo Day 18 Prompt:

This one comes to us from Stephanie Malley, who challenges us to write a poem based on the title of one of the chpaters from Susan G. Wooldridge’s Poemcrazy: Freeing Your Life with Words. The book’s  table of contents can be viewed using Amazon’s “Look inside” feature. Will you choose “the poem squash?” or perhaps “grocery weeping” or “the blue socks”? If none of the 60 rather wonderful chapter titles here inspire you, perhaps a chapter title from a favorite book would do? For example, the photo on my personal twitter account is a shot of a chapter title from a P.G. Wodehouse novel — the chapter title being “Sensational Occurrence at a Poetry Reading.”

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I found Susan’s TOC really intriguing. I picked up a lot of titles and since I couldn’t choose from those, I picked one as title and used others in my poem itself. I have highlighted the titles that I’ve used in the poem. Here is the list of titles that I picked :

Listening to our shadow,

Where do you come from

It looks like,

Lying to tell the truth

Poems are alive

Open the window

Stirring the sky

Being visited by words

Catching myself

Collecting words and creating a wordpool

Poem: Listening to our shadow

She stood there,

Silently,

Peacefully,

Smilingly,

Just watching me

–

“Where do you come from?”

I asked her astoundingly,

She continued smiling,

“It looks like, I know you,” I said

“You look so familiar,”

–

Towards the window,

Her frame moved quietly,

“Open the window?”

“Is that what you mean?”

Asked, a terrified me

–

Catching myself,

I moved towards the window,

She gaped at the sky,

I followed her eyes,

–

Stirring the sky

I felt her eyes talking to me,

Lying to tell the truth,

A mesmerizing experience it was,

That I wanted to seize,

Seal with my words

–

Poems bring visions to life,

Poems are alive

I was being visited by the words

Enthralled I was,

With my shadow dictating verse, wordlessly

–

Collecting words and creating a wordpool

My shadow became my muse

As I watched her agape

As I listened to her-

My shadow or me, myself

–

©Vandana Bhasin

18.04.2021