This month Women Writing for (a) Change-Bloomington poets are participating in National Poetry Writing Month.  Every day we will offer up a new  poem by a writer in our community.  Check back after 6:00pm for the Prompt of the Day and the selected resulting poem.

Today, I’d like to challenge you to write an elegy of your own, one in which the abstraction of sadness is communicated not through abstract words, but physical detail.

Day 18 — Elegy through detail by Lauren Bryant

April in Paris, the chestnut trees
exploding in green, that keen blue sky
all the cobblestone and precious narrow streets
where cars brush my chair on the café sidewalk,
verre du vin halfway to my lips when
a man rolling his cigarette over an espresso says,
Notre Dame is on fire.
We run, twisting our way through
the jarring two-tone calls of French fire
trucks, ambulances, police
whistles shrilling louder, longer,
yellow smoke smudging out the sun.
We reach the Seine. The cathedral’s
central spire flames like a votive candle
lit for Holy Week. Seared, its
skeleton pulses, jet black against
gilded blaze. It leans, lacy and delicate,
then falls, gracefully,
into the cross-shaped lava of the church
burning below.
Thousands of us gaze as if
in devotion. Above the throbbing
rose-red inferno, a stone saint stands,
hands folded in prayer.