Just Wondering

I often wondered how life might have been growing up as
Alice.
That was a name and an adventure I admired when I was
a child.
Would I have been a girl who followed rabbits, met queens,
consumed
potions and cake, and wasn’t afraid of
magic?
Or would I eventually have lost my head? I
wonder.

Kim M. Russell, 6th March 2025

Alice by Sir John Tenniel

It’s the first Thursday in March and, at the dVerse Poets Pub we are writing poetry of names for Meeting the Bar with our host, Laura, who begins her prompt with a lovely quotation from Pablo Neruda.

Not only is today World Book Day and my grandson’s seventh birthday, but Laura tells us that it is also ‘Learn what your name means’ day. She says it’s ‘a light-hearted day of discovery but yet it touches our core identity. One of the first sounds we hear is our allotted name, one of the first nouns we learn and one that firmly embeds the I-self as not-you, not-other.’

Laura has given examples of poems about names by Teresa Mei Chuc and Rachel Sherwood, to inspire us to write in a WaltMarie poetry style, which was invented by Candace Kubinec as a nod to Poetic Bloomings hosts, Marie Elena Good and Walter J. Wojtanik.  It consists of ten lines, in which the even lines are just two syllables and make their own mini-poem if read separately, while odd lines are longer but without syllable restriction, and meter and rhyme are unspecified. The theme of our poems should be: the history/meaning of our names, or one we wish we had, or an imaginary one

37 thoughts on “Just Wondering”

  2. Wondering what it would be like (an adventure in itself), you take us into Alice’s wonderland as if her name itself were a charm. Lovely use of the form, Kim.

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  9. I like your “wondering” here. Would life have been any different for us had we’d been named another name? I have to say, I like your given name, though. It was the name of one of my best friends when I was young.

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