We tried something new this month — a phrase acrostic, wherein you run every word in a line or phrase down the left side of a poem, just the way you would with letters in a standard acrostic. (It could be considered, as our pal Laura suggested, a flipped Golden Shovel.) Our source material was to be Maya Angelou’s iconic Still I Rise and, in my case, the line “With your bitter, twisted lies.” (I actually used it three times, for good measure.)
The cool thing about a form like this is it gives you a map to follow and you don’t really know where you’re going until you get there. What a surprise, for me, to end up researching the perennial herb bitterroot, and now I know stuff I didn’t. Yay, poetry!
Rises As Bitterroot
A Phrase-Acrostic After Maya Angelou’s STILL I RISE
With each teaspoon and tincture, I dissolve
your advantage, your
bitter bearing, I unknot your
twisted bombast and your
lies.
With each drop and dollop, you forget
your(self), you swallow
bitter(ness) like soup, your tongue is
twisted, your
lies double back, eat their own tails.
With medicine like mine,
your world withers, then rises as
bitter(root), blooms petaled and bright,
twisted up from stone. Hope
lies at our feet reborn.
Now, here are the others:
And Poetry Friday is at Marcie Atkin’s blog this time around!
Now, if you’d like to join us in August, we’re writing Bop poems (read about them here) so why not give it a whirl! Be safe and well, friends. Happy Friday.