A North Norfolk Midwinter

Broad, grey Norfolk skies.

Weave clouds.
Anthracite grey.

A boat,
steel river wash

forms intrepid in its wake,
discouraging ice.

Draws wintry breath,
draws roosting crows,

draws hoarfrost across bare fields,
landscape’s fallow womb.

Kim M. Russell, 5th April 2021

My response to NaPoWriMo Day Five

It’s Monday and it’s snowing here, not heavily, it’s Easter snow.

The prompt for today is called ‘The Shapes a Bright Container Can Contain’ after a poem by Theodore Roethke. The challenge is to find a poem, and then write a new poem that has the shape of the original, and in which every line starts with the first letter of the corresponding line in the original poem. The suggestion is to find a base poem that mixes long and short lines, or stanzas of different lengths. Any poem will do as a jumping-off point.

I chose ’Midsummer, Tobago’ by Derek Walcott, which you can find here: , which I turned around to make it about midwinter in North Norfolk.

13 thoughts on “A North Norfolk Midwinter”

  5. Boat wake discourages ice. Great imagery, KR.
    Up here they have an Ice-Out Contest to see who can predict when the sensor will fall through. It (finally!) happened Saturday. The winner was off by only 7 minutes, won $1500 dollars on a prediction he made back in October.

    But I digress. Sorry. I LOVE this poem.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. Thank you very much, Ron! The weather here Dubai erratic, I couldn’t possibly get on it. The sun is shining brightly now and the temperature has gone up!

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