Matins
We lie in each other’s shelter,
hiding what is necessary,
shedding guilt,
holding one another in the soft reverence
of those who seek to be loved.
We can hardly believe
how our pieces are coming together—
the hard world retreating,
falling like pages from our hands,
making us want that loss of everything
except the two of us.
Flattery is unnecessary, as is reassurance.
We hold one another as protection,
quieting each other,
gathering our petty problems
like brood hens put inside for the night,
safe and barely yearning
for the freedom of low branches,
flight to further fence posts and away.
How could we have ever wished escape?
Caught up in our private morning,
we find it hard to remember
what the rest of the world rails against.
Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt: find a poem in a book or magazine (ideally one you are not familiar with). Use a piece of paper to cover over everything but the last line. Now write a line of your own that completes the thought of that single line you can see, or otherwise responds to it. Now move your piece of paper up to uncover the second-to-last line of your source poem, and write the second line of your new poem to complete/respond to this second-to-last line. Keep going, uncovering and writing, until you get to the first line of your source poem, which you will complete/respond to as the last line of your new poem. It might not be a finished draft, but hopefully it at least contains the seeds of one.
This is a link to the poem “Hail Mary,” by Megan Blankenship that I chose from “Blackbird” Magazine to use to inspire my poem.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 
I love your poem but when I compared it to the original poem that you’d chosen, I noticed that they don’t have the same number of lines and then I got confused about what you wrote at which line. Still, the entirety makes sense. Don’t know about mine, but I loved doing it and I found this a great challenge:
https://manjameximovie3.wordpress.com/2018/04/18/day-18-peace/
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After I wrote it line to line, I broke up some of the longer lines. Decided after the technique was used, the important thing was the poem itself.
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I see. That’s why I ran out of lines when I compared them. It’s truly a special technique. I did two, but the first one was a weird Ezra Pound Canto and I decided to merely turn his words into their opposites (in this thin layer of paradise = out of that thick totality to hell) but it turned into one giant mess, as you can imagine. 😀 Still, a fun idea.
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This turned out very well – mine not so sure. I might have to give it another go after reading yours.
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It was hard.. I think the important thing is that you use it as a springboard to making a poem of your own, then edit as you see fit.
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