30 Poems in 30 Days

30 Poems in 30 Days
NaPoWriMo
A Project for National Poetry Writing Month

Thursday, April 19, 2018

Day 18 -- Revision as Call and Response

*The prompt for today is to take a published poem, and line by line from the bottom up, write a line in response, "revising" the original work, seeing it anew. The effort feels like call & response, and the original poem floats beneath the new, making a palimpsest. I chose to work with a few verses of Sonia Sanchez's "Haiku and Tanka for Harriet Tubman", which appears in the April issue of Poetry.


her legs catch light
they bridge and lift you
a golden hope away

unbound dark a shield
pressing, pressing
out, out

free rain
free air
on your skin

our own way
curved, arched
spinning our power