Love’s Blindfold: NaPoWriMo 2021, Day 3

13 Replies

Love’s Blindfold

The sunset painted you and me
against a bright raspberry sea.
My eyelash pressed against your lips,
I missed the passing of three ships.

Such freedom does enchantment bring
to cancel every other thing.
to pull the wool over our eyes,
all else but love to exorcise.

Here is the NaPoWriMo prompt that led to the above poem: 

And now for our prompt. This one is a bit involved, which is why I’m giving it to you on a Saturday. Today, I’d like to challenge you to make a “Personal Universal Deck,” and then to write a poem using it. The idea of the “Personal Universal Deck” originated with the poet and playwright Michael McClure, who gave the project of creating such decks to his students in a 1976 lecture at Naropa University. Basically, you will need 50 index cards or small pieces of paper, and on them, you will write 100 words (one on the front and one on the back of each card/paper) using the rules found here.

Don’t agonize over your word choices. Making the deck should be fun and revealing, as you generate words that sound “good” to you. The fact that the words are mainly divided among the five senses should be helpful in selecting words that you like the sound of, and that have some meaning personal to you. For example, my deck contains “harbor,” “wool,” “murmur,” “obsidian,” and “needle.”

Once you have your deck put together, shuffle it a few times. Now select a card or two, and use them as the basis for a new poem.

In lieu of choosing just two cards, I kept drawing more cards and choosing one of the words on it, front or back, to include in my poem.The words I chose were paint,  raspberry, eyelash, lips and sea. For

NaPoWriMo 2021, Day 3

This entry was posted in Poetry and tagged , , on by .
Unknown's avatar

About lifelessons

My blog, which started out to be about overcoming grief, quickly grew into a blog about celebrating life. I post daily: poems, photographs, essays or stories. I've lived in countries all around the globe but have finally come to rest in Mexico, where I've lived since 2001. My books may be found on Amazon in Kindle and print format, my art in local Ajijic galleries. Hope to see you at my blog.

13 thoughts on “Love’s Blindfold: NaPoWriMo 2021, Day 3”

  5. Smitha V's avatarSmitha V

    Your poem is beautiful Judy. Coincidentally atleast two of the words we picked are the same- sea and paint. The third- I spoke of eyelids and you eyelash 🙂

    Like

    Reply ↓
    1. lifelessons's avatarlifelessons Post author

      Would be interesting to compare all our words. If I get ambitious, I’ll compile them. I don’t have a list anymore other than the individual cards. Instructions said not to think much about them so I just took first thoughts but feel many are too mundane..

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply ↓
      1. Smitha V's avatarSmitha V

        That would definitely be interesting. I did not make the cards. I found it too tedious. I just made the list. It’s good to hear from you Judy again. Thanks to NaPoWriMo. 🙂

        Like

        Reply ↓
  6. Linda Crosfield's avatarLinda Crosfield

    I’m sorely confused about everything these days! I post my poems on my blog, not my website. And thanks for asking! purplemountainpoems.blogspot.com Now playing catch-up. In addition to it being poetry month I’m taking TWO online courses which both require much reading and thought. Oh well. It’s not like I’m going anywhere much these days.

    Like

    Reply ↓

Leave a comment