Poetry Thursday - Here is the News

The prompt this week at Poetry Thursday is to respond to something from the news. When I see prompts, my instinct is to mentally trawl through my body of work, and if something clicks then to offer this. This week, there's a poem I can offer that is connected. It was written at a workshop offered by Matthew Sweeney, and the exercise is an interesting one.

Select a random item from a newspaper, an item within the room in which you are writing, and an item outside the window of the room. Combine them somehow into a poem. This is one such poem:


................This Day: 4 July, 2002. Bantry

....................Now they are tossing the papers,
....................trying to shake the best bits of news
....................onto the table, to rattle the rest of the story
....................out like the last embers from the range.

....................It doesn't work like that! I want to say.
....................It isn't like Hampton Court Flower Show either -
....................model gardens made in six days, dismantled in one,
....................at the end of the second glorious week.

....................You think a recipe is all you need - for
....................beans on toast, a garden, the perfect war
....................or air-strike. Show me the pictures now. Where
....................are the bodies? Where is the blood?

....................Outside, a saint whose name escapes me
....................stretches bronze arms to the sea -
....................a call for calm or a beckoning.
....................Here, tell me the news. Tell me.

There will be more newsy poems HERE