A Comfy Kind Of Restless

Good Day!

Welcome to my Day 6 attempt at meeting the NaPo prompt.  Well…my FIFTH attempt at meeting this prompt, actually! Let me explain what I was asked to do…

“Take a look around Poetry International for a poem in a language you don’t know… Now, read the poem to yourself, thinking about the sound and shape of the words, and the degree to which they remind you of words in your own language. Use those correspondences as the basis for a new poem.” [from here]

So I tried poems from a few languages, but then decided to go with this Dutch poem by Eva Gerlach. What came out was not what I usually would advocate! I blame this violent turn on the fact that my newly-ten year old was playing a beat-em-up game on the opposite side of the table from me! (plus ‘het’ repeatedly appeared in the original poem, of course…)

I’ve screenshot the original poem below:

One can hit from habit and hit

With heft or as if green.  Hit

Not at all or with attitude

To mar or just warn away

Hope. He is nothing.

The hit times the hitter’s goals. Mar

Some in calm violence, like you’re being hit still,

The stand I know I took means nothing, opt

To tip toe when you come. Grief. It nicks,

Making all beg for tangible reckoning.

(Goals can’t redeem us while they wane)

A hit is virtuous.

I don’t know if it even works as a poem, but I must confess that after trying to make five other poems bend to my will, off and on for hours, I am TIRED 😉  I don’t remember the writing being this hard  the last time I tackled a similar prompt but having read the ramble around that poem, it seems I did find it a bit daunting after all!

Anyway, see you tomorrow for Day 7 where I’ll be trying to write around our Eldest celebrating becoming a teenager!  We now have two kids sporting double figures – and increasing attitude – eeek! 😉

Monty X

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