Last of the Wild Places

It is the last of the wild places,
drifts at the windy corners,
a low, far-reaching expanse.

The night was so transparent:
mud flats and tidal pools;
clumps of bushes made black stains;
of human inhabitants there are none.

Two black Norway spruces,
desolate, utterly lonely
where the road fell away.

Greys and blues and soft greens,
fresh furrows in the track.
Skies are dark in the long winters –
the night was perfectly still.

Kim M. Russell, 9th February 2023

Image by Nils Leonhardt on Unsplash

This Thursday, Laura is back to host Meeting the Bar at the dVerse Poets Pub, where we are patchworking some prose. She says that ‘patchworking or pieceworking is redolent of hard times when women joined pieces of cloth together for clothing or quilts or rugs’. I love the poetic examples she has given us, from Abigail Parry’s ‘The Quilt’, ‘Stencilled Memories’ by Lorna Dee Cervantes, and Thom Gunn’s ‘Patch Work’.

The challenge is to sew together pieces of prose to make a poem as follows. We must:

•          Choose TWO books of prose
•          Pick ONE page from each
•          Extract SHORT LINES from each page
•          ALTERNATE them to make a poem
•          Use italics and plain font to differentiate the text sources
•          Use one of the source lines or a combination as TITLE

We must NOT add anything of our own to the lines. However, we may use enjambment and we can split the poem into stanzas. We must cite our sources with author, book title and page number.

Sources:

The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico page 7 (Penguin edition)

Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton page 43 (Wordsworth Classics edition)

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29 thoughts on “Last of the Wild Places”

  3. This is absolutely stunning, Kim! 😍 I especially admire; “Greys and blues and soft greens, fresh furrows in the track.” Lovely patchworking here!

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  7. Beautiful, peaceful, and pastoral that induces calm. I love how you put this in the center of the poem as if for reinforcement: “of human inhabitants there are none.” Such a nice poem, Kim.

    Liked by 1 person

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