Altered Substance
26 December 2020 Saturday Poetry Prompt: sigillaria
Your wooden gestures invite me to freeze, in the snow, again; I wait but just for another silence that cannot take me beyond the empty footprints behind me. Are you going to wrap around me? Can you?
Oak, or elm…but person? And I try to scale this silence, melt it into something to be brought inside. I don’t see your strings, but why won’t you move?
And becoming cherry, or yew, or turning tricks over mistletoe last year, but now I have a statue, a grief improperly named, from the former moment to this: how did you do it?
If you leave now, I guess it will all remain unsaid. You can take your carved version of vice and disappear, blow away, blizzard as usual, and I can go back to staring out of windows, thinking you’d be returned by now.
J.D. Harms 2020
Prompt:
I am writing this prompt based on an idea from Eli Snow. (Extra points, as always, for pagan references.) There’s a common slogan this time of year, said/repeated often enough, gods know, that approximates to “the magic of the season”. Today’s prompt is asking you to write a piece where a human interaction or person becomes inanimate. From subject to object (death would be the most obvious situation). Sigillaria…
