43/2023

Winter has harvested its crop
Of lives, and planted misery
Instead of wheat into the fallow
Soil, bare land as far as eyes dare
To look, as bleak as eyes care to
See. The blood rivers ooze into
The mud, and corpses’ bones
Skitter underfoot.
Winter cares not; all that counts
Is to strip these fields of hope
So spring can’t restore it.

R 12/02/2023 16:19

Today’s #MastoPrompt was #wheat.

It’s interesting how these things develop. I made two efforts to write to the prompt earlier today, and my pen didn’t even youch the paper, so bereft was I of ideas (Theresa May and her wheat fields did cross my mind, but that’s overused and ridiculous).

It wasn’t until I actually until my feet touched the fields just north of Sprowston that phrases started forming themselves in my brain. And when I stopped to take a selfie with the fields in the background, that’s where I jotted it down onto my phone really quickly so I wouldn’t lose the momentum of the walk (or the thoughts).

The real weakness of having the mastodon charcter limit is that I know I may never go back to these short poems to make them longer (because this one bears being extended, too). I remember deciding at least a decade ago that I would go through all my past work (and I started writing poetry when I was 18ish) and rework at least the better ones. The notebook I even titled The Rewrites has one or two pages written on; the rest are blank.

Perhaps it’s a good thing the creative mind moves on quickly (although having said that, I’ve tired of editing Aggie already and said to M and A yesterday that I feel like just deleting the thing – I won’t, of course; I am no longer of the age of high dudgeon even if I often hate my own writing).