For our fifth prompt, we were asked to take a famous poem and use each word, in sequence, as a last word in each of our lines. I chose “In a Station of the Metro” by Ezra Pound.

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.  

Here is my poem:

Dateless Saturday Night

How she worries the
puzzle of her 16 years, her face an apparition
in the mirror of
her window. These
nights with no other faces
in them, no other voices in
them. She sits alone, apart from the
cool crowd,
plucking her own petals,
“He loves me. He loves me not” playing on
her radio, a
hand holding one more piece that doesn’t fit, wet
with her dew, the whole world black
grackles on a leafless bough.

-0-

That was so fun, I did another, this one based on Robert Frost’s “Devotion.”

The heart can think of no devotion
Greater than being shore to the ocean–
Holding the curve of one position,
Counting an endless repetition.

Here is my second poem:

The

Changing “a” to “the”
is something the heart
will not do before it can.
It is not a matter of what we think,
but rather of
how we must. No
“should” can prompt devotion.
Nothing in our small lives is greater
than loving, than
being
loved. In our pursuit of it, we search for the shore
we were born to drift to,
swell towards the
home the ocean
of our being wants for us, holding
our happiness in the
breaker’s last curve.
What we are made of
is this becoming one––
curling from our lonely position
toward our safe harbor, counting
our failures shore after shore with an
aching to find the one. This seeking? It is endless,
and makes our world in its repetition.