LBI Poets 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 March is to write an original poem using a word, a phrase, or a line from Ted Kooser's poem, The Red Wing Church.

The Red Wing Church

by Ted Kooser

 There’s a tractor in the doorway of a church
in Red Wing, Nebraska, in a coat of mud
and straw that drags the floor. A broken plow
sprawls beggarlike behind it on some planks
that make a sort of roadway up the steps.
The steeple’s gone. A black tar-paper scar
that lightning might have made replaces it.
They’ve taken it down to change the house of God
to Homer Johnson’s barn, but it’s still a church,
with clumps of tiger lilies in the grass
and one of those boxlike, glassed-in signs
that give the sermon’s topic (reading now
a bird’ s nest and a little broken glass).
The good works of the Lord are all around:
the steeple top is standing in a garden
just up the alley; it’s a hen house now:
fat leghorns gossip at its crowded door.
Pews stretch on porches up and down the street,
the stained-glass windows style the mayor’s house,
and the bell’s atop the firehouse in the square.
The cross is only God knows where.

As a Bonus Challenge use three or more of the following words chosen at random from the memoir entitled  Barbara Jordon: A Self-Portrait by Barbara Jordon and Shelby Hearon.

March, 1977, grandpa, attachment, Sunday, ties, patter, dinner, Baptist, union, nap, bundled, River Oaks, cardboard, ripped, junk, cafe, hook, tin, crayon, pine needles, bicycle, stuff, zipper, relation, horse, bag, catechism, water, kitchen, smoothing iron, barbecue, decision, accentuating, Texas, bandaged, felony, teacher, marry, impede, dare, cumbrous garb, prohibitions, Booker T, curfew, incident, coat, blackberry cobbler, competitors, piano, raged, snapped, operating, Harvard, tossing, zealously, intimacy, oppression, gums, Senate Bill 79, segregate, whereas, light, plight, purge, commitment, afflicted, literary, epic, cynical, incisive, Tricky Dick, seeker, sing, jocular, oblige, freshman, close, hue, property, bunting, solid

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