August 22, 2023

This week’s 10-line poem is actually 37 lines.

It was prompted by a creative writing exercise I learned years ago from Laurie Wagner of 27 Powers, and which I shared this past week in my  writing group. The exercise uses Swedish poetry as a jumpstart to provide the structure for the new poem; the rest of the process involves creating a translation based not on actual knowledge of Swedish but rather what the words might be if one imagined one knew Swedish. In other words, it’s entirely made up. (The trick is NOT to read the actual translation of the original Swedish poem first.) The poem I used as my prompt is “Nattmannen” by Ingela Strandberg. My “translation” follows.

late August 

What are we to do
in late August

An ice cream scoop
pooling at the bottom
with the wet skin of summer.

The rain has made
a grave of the tomatoes, each globe
ripped at the center stitch.
Seeds exposed as tears.
This grief 

of what went missing
in the night
as the moon dragged its face across the dark.

Any day now, we say glumly
in our coffee cups,
the tide will turn a somersault.
But the paper keeps up its melodramas,
which we swat like barren flies
hovering uselessly on a bone
emptied of its former glories. 

We want to break into a song
we have never rehearsed and yet,
the tirade in us

plays the next tune
and we change the next
load of sheets.

This is its own urgency.

The day unfolds on our pillows, late August starchy
from sleep and picnics
We weed the sodden garden
to distract us from our estrangement.

It is almost time for soup. 

The salt

will return us 
to the sea of late August
if we taste it.