GloPoWriMo Day 20 - front yard dogwood

 

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 20

You may not realize it at first, but the poem "Black Swan on Water" by Carl Phillips is a single sentence! The three-line stanzas mimic the “braids in water” in the penultimate line, and the way the lines get longer and longer also makes the poem as a whole look a bit like the widening wake that a swan leaves as it swims. For today, try writing your own poem that uses an animal that shows up in myths and legends as a metaphor for some aspect of a contemporary person’s life. Include one spoken phrase.



_____________________________________________

Front Yard Dogwood

I know 

it’s growing

but I can’t see it,

watching this dogwood

in the yard every year since

third grade–it’s still too little

to climb, and I can still reach to

hang from the lowest branch; it

bends and the notched pink flowers shift

to face me, smelling like my own skin after

a bath, and I wonder How does it feel for you, this

growing with no one to mark it on the wall of the air?

draft ©HM 2026