First Bite (Poem)

Hey, y’all!

It’s Day 2 of National Poetry Month. Each day, I follow the poetry prompts on napowrimo.net.

Todays prompt: The Romanian-born poet Paul Celan once wrote a series of surrealist questions and answers. Today’s prompt asks you to begin by picking 5-10 words from the following list: owl, generator, fog, river, clove, miracle, cyclops, oyster, mercurial, seaweed, gutter, artillery, salt, elusive, thunder, ghost, acorn, cheese, longing, cowbird, truffle, quahog, song. Next, write out a question for each word that you’ve selected (e.g., what is seaweed?) Now for each question, write a one-line answer. Try to make the answer an image, and don’t worry about strict logic. After you’ve written out your series of questions and answers, place all the answers, without the questions, on a new page. See if you can make a poem of just the answers.

I chose these 8 words: owl, fog, oyster, salt, thunder, ghost, acorn, song. Here’s my poem:

FIRST BITE

By Farah Lawal Harris, © 2023

The first slice of pie

be like tongue candy,

like elevator stop toward heaven,

a shout declaring love.

The first bite of the first slice

is interrupted by the sound

of stomping boots,

the appearance of

outside’s nightgown coming loose,

then rain.

Brief commercial break.

But back to the first taste:

mixture of sweet wrapped in

recent oven heat and steam,

tongue burning, plate dropping,

crust sliding ‘cross the floor

like a cracker dipped in tears.

A sky giant adorned in feathers appears.

Perhaps she is a symbol for anger,

or maybe it’s just hunger delayed

by broken plate and smeared fruit.

So the second slice of pie

be like…