I've been writing a lot recently, but it's mostly been working on ideas I've already started. Though I've been very productive I've started to feel I'm running out of new ideas for anything longer than haiku (for which i rarely run out of ideas). I've therefore been looking at writing prompts again, even though I'd given up on them for lots of different reasons. Half an hour before writing this post, I saw the latest prompt on Applehouse Poetry Workshop, which was to write a poem about something small and insignificant and start the poem 'Today I want to say something wonderful'. The example given was a poem about a potato peeler and I, perhaps cheating, wrote a poem about my potato peeler. I think though there are lots of general ideas for more poems which could come from this prompt.
In Praise of My Potato Peeler
Today I want to say something wonderful
about my potato peeler
about how it fits as snugly into my left hand
as other people's fit into their right,
how it skims smoothly over the skin
of potato or even, as I prefer my potatoes
scrubbed not peeled, the fresh picked apples
from my in-laws' garden.
Now my apples are smoothly segmented,
rather than roughly gouged and pitted
and the same number of apples
makes a bigger crumble.
And I am transformed from clumsy
into almost a domestic goddess.
As ever, text in red contains hyperlinks which take you to other webpages where you can find out more.
7 comments:
And someone else need not peel the peels!
I love a good potato peeler. BL prefers a knife - she leaves a lot of potato on the skin!
I bet that said peeler is standing proudly in its pot on the worktop, glowing with pride at being praised so well.
Wonderful idea, Juliet ... and I am also left handed.
The world has plenty room for a few lines about a potato peeler, or indeed more, if you've borrowed the idea from elsewhere.
For me haiku are like the waves, they're there all the time if you want them (and every 7th is big) but I'm afraid the muse is tidal. Hope yours comes in again soon.
Yay, new writing, new writing!
We never use a peeler here, just a paring knife. Probably because my Mom never uses one, as she insists that she has cut herself every time she has tried one. Funny how the habits of our parents can persist in ourselves. You've done a great job of making us pause to reconsider the everyday object here.
Sometimes the mundane makes the best topics. :)
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