The following poem is based on an exercise I like to do with my creative writing elective, the newest installment unfolding as we speak. Deal out cards to see what you/your fellow players get. Enforce that three random pieces from those cards enter into your poem. In my case, I was dealt the Queen of Spaces (easy!), the Jack of Hearts and the 9 of diamonds, plus two other cards that I can, by rules of this game, discard. My deck of cards had an extra feature of Russian churches pictured within--they, too, could factor in the process of writing freely with random factors playing foil. This poem began as my students began, about 15 minutes after our hand was dealt. Admittedly, I've put some extra time in its present draft:
A queen of spades
doesn’t
need a knight—she
operates
by day looking all alone
for creatures in their ninth and
kills them
royally, without a
warning call.
You’d say that ninth
is past due
anyway:
why
should felines get
what
striving, writhing blastulas
remotely
cannot hope?
Why weep for
fortunes—kings
and queens—
if,
like Macbeths, they only dwell on
only
death, such heavens and such hell?
Why
play our hand in cat-
scratch all-indulgent
lands, and
all the while
the
Queen of Spades sits patiently,
seizing
nothing not her own. She isn’t
Jezebel
or any of her clones.
We go to churches,
temples,
mosques to
stand
against this queen. We do
not
win, we rather sing the futility
of
her cause and thus
We take her in.
She’s
lonely, after all,
and
probably she kills to have
some
friends. An educated guess, of course,
and
one we’ll have to fill.
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