GloPoWriMo Day 10 - goodbye

Each day the folks at NaPoWriMo are offering a prompt, and I'll start there and see what happens. I'm using my daily drafts to work on a middle grade book with the working title of TREEOGRAPHY, so there will be a lot of tree drafts this month. 

APR 10

In his poem, “Goodbye,” Geoffrey Brock describes grief in three short stanzas, the second of which is entirely made up of a rhetorical dialogue. Write your own meditation on grief. Try using Brock’s form as the “container” for your poem: a few short stanzas, with a middle section in which a question is repeated with different answers given.

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Goodbye

Some things I can’t come back to. Your trunk is gone, your stump is all that’s left. If I hadn’t known you whole, your stump would be enough.

How did this happen? With noise and careless sawdust in the air? How did this happen? Like a murder meditated in the night?

Your stump still speaks for you. And I can bring all five senses, let my own trunk and both hands topple in a pile of life on your ringed plinth.

draft ©HM 2026