Hello, everyone.
Elizabeth Smither is 80 years old. She was first published in 1975. A New Zealander, she has won numerous national awards.
Samuel Green was born in 1948 in Washington State. As well as having been a state poet laureate, he is also a bookbinder.
Some themes at work in the first text include butterflies, dreams, and threats to youth.
Butterflies are also a theme of the second text, but the sense of threat is absent, replaced with beauty and light.
The structure of the first text is 15 lines, divided into sets of three lines. This form resembles a 14-line sonnet, but it's slightly less traditional.
The structure of the second text is a single paragraph of short lines.
You could write today using any of the above themes or structures.
Six words to attempt to incorporate into your writing from Smither: dust, light, quick, unkind, fate, things.
Six words from Green: welcome, uncommon, rescue, singular, true, complex.
If you have a copy of The Exercise Book (Manhire, Duncum, Price & Wilkins), turn to "#31: Opening The Door" for an additional challenge.
That's all. I hope you are inspired to write today.
The Butterfly Girl
by Elizabeth Smither
Her unblemished skin thick with pancake
Like wing dust, she asks me if I know
The meaning of 'butterflies' in dreams.
How light sometimes a librarian's footsteps
To the small reference section of the arcane
And quick through the index to Dreams.
'Butterflies = to fluctuate' I explain
Wondering how she will interpret this:
As fate unkind or rising like a sea?
Soon we are bending over the hugest Dictionary
And I am making sea-motions with my hands
'Your fate will ebb and flow, it sounds hopeful
Some things will go well, some less so
But butterflies in dreams are not threatening
Even the Oxford English Dictionary says so.'
Butterflies
by Samuel Green
Some days her main job seems to be
to welcome back the Red Admiral
as it lights on a leaf of the yellow
forsythia. It is her duty to stop & lean
over to take in how it folds & opens
its wings. Then, too, there is the common
Tiger Swallowtail, which seems to her
entirely uncommon in how it moves
about the boundaries of this clearing
we made so many years ago. If she leaves
the compost bucket unwashed to rescue
a single tattered wing from under the winter
jasmine or the blue flowers of the periwinkle
& then spends a whole afternoon at our round
oak table surrounded by field guides
& tea until she is sure—yes—that it belongs to
a Lorquin's Admiral, or that singular
mark is one of the great cat's eyes
of a Milbert's Tortoiseshell, then she is
simply practicing her true vocation
learning the story behind the blue beads
of the Mourning Cloak, the silver commas
of the Satyr Anglewing, the complex shades
of the Spring Azure, moving through this life
letting her sweet, light attention land
on one luminous thing after another.
!hivebits