Enceladus. Not enchiladas.
Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt is to use what’s outside your window to make a list or toolbox of nouns, colours and verbs to play with in creating a poem.
It wasn’t quite happening, so I had a look through the day’s news for further inspiration and came across this story about Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons (not the popular Mexican food, although it does sound similar). Scientists have confirmed that there is likely to be a large body of water which might – a big might – contain some form of life…
So I used the word bank I generated (looking out of a cafe window earlier) and tried to apply them to a poem about Enceladus…This is a useful technique sometimes, to force new or different ways of expressing things. You can, for example, list verbs to do with a job (butchery, or athletics, or ironmongery) and then use those verbs on an entirely unrelated subject matter – so you could get ‘welding’ in a poem about food. (This is something Margret Geraghty describes in her book ‘The Five-Minute Writer’). It’s a nice way to get verbs ‘working harder’.
As ever – it’s work in progress and I have no idea if the word-transposing thing worked here, but it’s something to try eh?
And I am now up to date with my poems! And so to bed, with thoughts of space…
Enceladus Street
or, Piece of String Territory
A billioned reddened weather vanes
turn to face the galvanized grey
of its vents. The idea of blue
looms in over our sensors:
aqua-marines, royals, magentas.
Away from the safety-
yellow of the street-light Sun,
the indecipherable graffiti
of Earth. Our drifting CCTV
taxis, like an echo in this dark
car park, never paying
or displaying.
Could this be just
(half)
the ticket?
A prime location to
(almost)
make it?
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