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.
Prompt Day 2: Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a poem that resists closure by ending on a question, inviting the reader to continue the process of reading (and, in some ways, writing) the poem even after the poem ends.
Daffodils by Shana Ritter
Who planted the daffodils on the wooded hill
overgrown with trees and bracken, brambles
and twisting vine? Large stones, half buried in dirt
tumbled, cracked and moss covered mark the place
a house once stood, the steps leading up, the lintel
of a doorway. A young family come west cut their wood
shaped the logs, brought stones from the quarry nearby
and shaped the rooms to suit the land.
A young woman knelt in the newly turned soil
Bulbs bulging from her apron pockets brought
From her east coast home. And while the children
napped in the almost finished room
the slant of late autumn afternoon fell
across her knees as carefully sowed
a promise of spring.
Now across the hill where no one lives
a wild profusion of yellow blooms
willy-nilly around trunks and fallen branch
and no matter when they open there’s always
one last snow to cover them, one last freeze
and still they go on singing
a thousand small suns promising.