LBI Poet's Studio

Whether you are an accomplished poet or a new one, our monthly workshop will inspire you. To attend this virtual event contact Sue Cummings via email scummings817@comcast.net.

This group meets the 1st Thursday of every month from 1:00 pm - 3:00 pm. You may also join the program in-person at the LBI Library in the meeting room each month.

Our prompt for April is to write an original poem using a word, a phrase or a line from Shireen Madon's poem, Vessel With Two Feet, ca 1000-800BCE 
Vessel With Two Feet, ca. 1000–800 BCE
by Shireen Madon
 
It’s as though the birds all know each other, and how naively
they seem to believe the world will go on. The swans oh-so-sweetly
in their museum-white, yet all anger and sinew like teen girls,
believing they own all of this, our planet, the greens and blues, until
they gorgeously realize they have been neglected. The crows—
their feathers touched with the most purplish verbena purples
of a sunrise over a smoked sky—know otherwise.
They seem to have known the fate of things before we did.
Have you never heard them awake at the crack of dawn? What
else do you think they have been preparing for, if not the end?
In the Brooklyn Museum, there is a Vessel with Two Feet from
which wine was drunk in Ancient Persia, when my people were
still there, finding a religion. Wine would be poured into the clay
vessel from above and flow out from holes in two actual feet
at the bottom. It appears to be the bottom half of a pregnant woman,
but only to me. Drinking from these little legged vessels
was said to remove the drinker’s grief, and what are artifacts
if not the misunderstandings of a happy life. The plaque helpfully
reminds us that a vessel with holes on the bottom would not be
practical for storage. On the rooftop across from our apartment, where
just last week a twenty-something danced a primeval dance for TikTok,
we watch a pair of crows make a nest in a cracked plant pot.
 
As a Bonus Challenge use three or more of the following words chosen at random from Mary Cuffe Perez's book of Short and Shorter Stories entitled, What I Thought You Said.
 
away, back door, Uncle, perfect, sale, paper, deconstruction, haying, fetch, agitation, intent, contest, chair, snow, mudroom, glide, dawdling, knees,  floorboards,
scalding, escarpment, pasture, fox, destination, woodshed, zizzing, bleached, ferocious, lumbering, hemlocks, scurry, dusk, poach, quickest, grin, lolling, collapsed, knoll, beets, crumpled, caterwauling, Rochester, exit, dominoes, elephant, remaining, transmit, reek, barrens, breath, patches, fringes, platform, sketch pad, unravels, pier, sidewalk, maze, nascent, strokes, brink, deaf, jeep, parka, shiver, cards, research, dalliance, truck, ridiculous, audiologist, stonewall, perch, cathedral, mock, commitment, asparagus, pout, current, imperceptible, domiciles, ponytail, necessity

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