August

Once in a lifetime,
maybe twice, but no more,
you realise that you are turning
from growing to giving back:
ripening.

The fruit, grain and light know.
Your body knows from the settling
in your chest — a quiet pause,
in which you’re not quite ready
to let go.

Everything ripens:
wheat, corn, apple, tomato,
sunflower.

Even a poem.

Kim M. Russell, 18^th August 2026

Today I’m hosting Tuesday Poetics at the dVerse Poets Pub with a prompt I borrowed from The Poetry Society (UK). It’s based on a poem by Mary Jean Chan, ‘The Window’, which came second in the National Poetry Competition in 2017.

It begins with a somewhat grand statement: “Once in a lifetime , you will gesture at an open window…” The reader is presented with an open window, but we see beyond it into the poet’s life, in which she is struggling with her mother’s reaction to her coming out as queer.

Our challenge is to read and explore Chan’s poem, particularly the use of line breaks and caesura to build rhythm and evoke emotion, and a three-word movement: “anger is like the sun, which is like love”, and then write a poem in the first person that begins with “Once in a lifetime”.

We must think of a three-word movement like anger/sun/love and develop it in a poem about a real situation in our past or current lives, or something that happened to someone we know, or an imagined situation. My three word movement is growing/giving/ripening.