RAP: Emotion’s in the Details

L.L. here, with Random Acts of Poetry—remembering a bittersweet goodbye. It was tucked into the pages of Kristin Lavransdatter… a few details about a woman letting the reins on her father’s horse slip through her fingers, as he mounted to turn towards home. Reading this, I was crushed. It’s their final goodbye, I realized.

As in fiction, so in poetry. Emotion is not, as Ted Kooser notes, in the modifiers– “that poor, miserable blind child with his wee white cane.” Rather, emotion is in the details themselves. The child who cannot see. A white cane tapping emptiness. It’s a subtle difference and he notes, “a poet can avoid sentimentality by giving the reader credit for knowing how to respond to something without being led by the nose.”

Our featured poem this week relies on details, and leaves the rest up to you the reader:
Marcus’s Mowing Dead Grass After Church on Sunday

Stubborn life knows no rest.
Our desert lawn grows tall enough
to tickle my fat dog’s chest
in just one week. I don’t water
and still it grows, not green,
not lush, not Whitman’s fresh cut
hair of graves, but burrs and tentacle
grass like dead spiders, brittle
brown in the heat. No poet’s passed
here under my army surplus boot-
soled feet, but the dead demand
attention from suburban morticians
trimming the nails of corpse plots
with coughing, greasy Troybilts
hacking, at the highest setting,
their zombie lawns, flinging mulched
stickers into shins. Here’s the truth,
I’ll admit my sin. I love this Sabbath
work, my mower’s loud drone
swallows the noisy world whole.

ALL RAP PARTICIPANT’s:
LL’s Longing; Offering
Sara’s Universe
Jennifer’s Thin Place
Claire’s Boxed Being
Cindy’s In Our Mind’s Eye
Jim’s Hot Summer Night
Milton’s It’s Just the Way My Mind Works
Dave’s The Cold Season
Monica’s Leather Bible Cover
Deb’s Orange Glow

If you would like a poetry prompt for next week, see this week’s post at LL’s.

Flower After Rain photo and post by L.L. Barkat.

Tagged as: how to write poetry, improve writing, Online Writing, Poetry Home Repair Manual, random acts of poetry, Ted Kooser