Mattie's Pillow

Honoring small things.

Glow, a frequent contributor to the poetry challenge, writes that her beloved kitty, Toklas, died yesterday.

So, write about something so small that we might overlook it, but that forms a kind of glue in daily life–the purr of a cat, the sound of a furnace in the background, the feel of a good writing pen, the taste of well-brewed coffee.  Write without sentimentality, but give the small thing its due, in honor of a yellow cat.

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Here’s Glow’s poem:

at home,
the river did not run wild
but flowed bounded
red dirt farms on one side
tame oak forests on the other
every day for fourteen years
I walked to the river
sat on the Rock and watched it pass
swam in summer with catfish
long as my arms
tempted lightning during storms
cried, raged, bathed, napped,
laughed, combed my hair,
made love, called kitties and goats and dogs,
giggled at puppies learning to swim,
did ritual, chatted with the neighbors,
listened to crickets, frogs, mockingbirds,
unseen rustlers in the brush,
hiked, found arrowheads,
picked mushrooms, built fires,
scratched chiggers, swatted bugs,
mapped the edges of the land,
but mostly just sat, watched, endured
daily tedium
released by the incessant brown water
just like hundreds of souls before me
who lived along the river
lulled by the flow of water
to carry on the duties of life and death

Tags: beauty, cats, poetry, Psyche, small things, writing, writing prompt

This entry was posted on October 19, 2009 at 9:25 pm and is filed under Poetry Challenge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.