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.
“twisted up from stone. Hope/ lies at our feet reborn.”
I love these lines.
How ambitious you were using the same line for each stanza. Genius!
Oh, my the rule of threes works its magic here…you literally twist the meaning of bitter from stanza to stanza as the poem grows, leaving us with hope. Wowza.
Oh, see, I ended up starting over and forgot about the PHRASE part of this phrase acrostic!! Argh! Oh, well.
I unknot your twisted bombast and your lies is such a lovely use of the ugliness offered to the original poem.
Man you twisted this phrase like a pro. My favorite twists are how you first “unknot your twisted bombast and your lies” and then how the petals “twist up from stone.” Hope is indeed reborn, this is gorgeous.
So so lovely. So so powerful. And everything we need to fight off the monster in Laura’s poem.
Talk about magic… the weaving of the phrase “with your bitter twisted lies” to a perennial herb and the perfect photo accompaniment! I love the voice, the insistence -three times- increasingly scalding, that the speaker will be heard.
So interesting! I have studied medicinal plants for nine years or so but I haven’t studied bitterroot (it’s not native to me). Bitters are traditionally good for digestion…enabling things to be swallowed but preventing them from causing disturbances.
Liz, this is so bitterly beautiful and recursive. Something about the repetition recalls the struggle against dark things, against bitterness, and how it must be revisited often, worked with, to become something good.
Again and again and again we have to taste and then spit that bitterness back at them (cf https://twitter.com/0liviajulianna). The repetition is powerful and
“you swallow
bitter(ness) like soup, your tongue is
twisted, your
lies double back, eat their own tails” is the ugly truth. Brava.