Friday, September 24, 2010

POETRY FRIDAY: TRA LA LA

This poem was the result of a poetry challenge that involved drawing a picture (I drew a woman singing "La La") and passing it around a circle with a new person drawing it after only seeing it for a few seconds. Kind of a "Cranium" (the board game) challenge, or a written game of "Telephone."  My drawing went around the circle  without changing too much, except that the original words "La la" which I had written next to the woman's mouth had morphed into "Blah blah." Assignment: Write a poem about what changed. So here is what I wrote, taking a few liberties with one La and and one Blah:

FROM LA TO BLAH

By the time La turned into Blah
she had left Woo-Woo so far behind
it had become Woe.  

It's so easy, we all know, 
for La to get lost, 
at least for awhile. 

And adding Tra to the La
only goes so far. About as far
as she could throw it on a gray day. 

Now she knows in her own way
it's a mood, and she wants to shake it
the way she shook a rattle and cooed
for her first born. 

But the urge to mourn is winning.
La, she has decided,
belongs at the beginning.

-----------------------------------------------------------
Karen Edmisten is in charge of the Poetry Friday round-up today. Head over to her blog to see what's up.

4 comments:

  1. Excellent! This nails it for me:

    she had left Woo-Woo so far behind
    it had become Woe.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Love that ending. The urge... the deciding. Yes.

    ReplyDelete
  3. "the urge to mourn" -- that's great.

    And of Richard Wilbur: "His mastery of form, his intelligence, his playfulness, his sense of wonder, and his curiosity - " Yes and yes and yes. Worth every moment of obsession. :)

    ReplyDelete
  4. Sigh. Life so often turns from La La to Blah Blah.

    Second: maybe because I write about a brown world, I just want to say that the cover on your Imaginary Menagerie book really strikes my eye--it simply glows!

    ReplyDelete