See Something New

Ode to Sylvia Plath

Today’s optional prompt asks you, like Alice Notley, to think about your own inspirations and forebears (whether literary or otherwise). Specifically, I challenge you today to write a poem that deals with the poems, poets, and other people who inspired you to write poems. These could be poems/poets/poepl that you strive to be like, or even poems, poets, and people that you strive not to be like. There are as many ways to go with this prompt as there are ways to be inspired.

I am important to her, she comes and goes
studying my words and rhymes
like prayers she had to memorize.
Fish to the water, birds to the sky,
her words take off on the canvas before her.

She is important to me,
I search her reaches for what she really was;
affairs of the heart, love,
passionate, sweet love
of a man who couldn't love her back.

Her words fill my heart and my soul,
like a mirror reflecting back,
the words rise toward me,
day after day,
like a terrible fish.