WORLD POETRY DAY 2023 WRITING PROMPT
Ode to Green
Be poetic — even when plagued
Wine is sunlight, held together by water. Galileo All shall be well. Lady Julian of Norwich
I stand at the kitchen window, savoring the cup of broth’s scented warmth in my hands — eyes quaffing the water falling from the sharp slate ledges of sky echoing a dishwasher’s rinse cycle. Rain — liquid sunlight out-intoxicating wine. My ecstatic pores dance.
Let it pour, let it pour, let it pour.
Hildegard’s veriditas reigns anew. I can sense it. The heartbreakingly crisped notations of ivy on the walls are reviving — Amendment where it matters most, at root level. Prepping the new paint job properly while I worship the Process. Gratitude — my hymnal, lyricist, composer.
Every leafling is Lazarus. Every vine, a reclamation of its sacred rite to gift wrap the property in absinthe-dewed Communion. Palms, laurel leaf figs, live oaks, olive trees sprout Crayola swaths and dotted half notes as, lazily, time lapses. Friends, feast with me — on green-green, yellow green, green yellow, forest green, caterpillar complemented with side dishes of lavender and purple mountain’s majesty presented, with parsley-sprinkled aplomb, by the jacarandas.
The Japanese maple, watered with tears last summer and fall, majestically decant the rarest color of all. Issued only once upon a time. C-Rex.
I am boxed in Delight despite feeling damn near the age of the dinosaurs and equally as doomed.
My climate has changed — antigen as asteroid.
My reptilian brain balks. The three droplets pool, trickle, stalk.
Begone, ghoul — begone, Wuhan’s psycho spawn.
The rhythm’s off. There is rhyme, but no Reason. For the second time in three months, why me?
Why not me? Shit storms happen. As do droughts.
As do viruses encoded to evolve until our own code of conduct catches on and echoes theirs — rather than theirs echoing ours.
Mutate. Be contagion greening — a killer of petrified approaches that never worked even when fresh and fleshed with hope.
Always be a poet even in prose.
Even when fucked — when you’re in yet another dance macabre with an achromatic microbe — and you envy the wallflowers in razzle dazzle rose and shamrock.
Ah, Amendment. Yet again you have stepped on my toes. But oh well. All shall be.
©Jenine Bsharah Baines 2023
Yep, for the second time in three months, I got Covid. I am beginning to suspect it’s an occupational hazard of substitute teaching at a middle/high school.
I attempted to come to grips with it all — with heart and with flair! — in a hybrid prose-poem inspired by Carolyn Hastings’s prompt:
Thank you, team at Paper Poetry — Suntonu Bhadra, Indubala Kachhawa, and Carolyn Hastings — for accepting my belated contribution to Paper Poetry’s celebration of World Poetry Day, March 21.
Thank you, dearest readers. Love with flair! (Carolyn, can you tell I am quite taken by your depiction?) May love green your today, tomorrow, and forever.
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