Scribbled out, redacted, replaced,
love creeps and creeps, desire is all wrong,
and this shell holds words and worlds
and sudden amnesia, and slow loss,
and reflections – shattered, shimmering
in rivers, oceans, and the moon’s interpretation
of the sun. I’m trying to remember
the words I threw away,
I work at it, knowing I haven’t caught it,
the sun on my skin, and the movement of water –
is this right? is this right?
I make a mist of my breath, and cloud the surface.
Smell is the oldest sense. It knows it all,
melting with the passing of time,
moving over the water, the moving water.
My contribution to NaPoWriMo for today. It’s a complex prompt, basing a poem on another poem, preferably one you don’t know. I chose Coda: Lost Poem by Rachel Boast, which I found in The Forward Book of Poetry 2018. I can’t find the poem online, but you can see more of Rachel’s work here: http://www.thecompassmagazine.co.uk/rb/
We were asked to take a poem we don’t know, and start from the bottom, taking each line individually and in isolation, and writing a line in a response to it. The new, response lines, form the new poem.
Sarah writes poems 