National Poetry Writing Month – Day 3
Prompt:
Find a shortish poem that you like, and rewrite each line, replacing each word (or as many words as you can) with words that mean the opposite. For example, you might turn “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” to “I won’t contrast you with a winter’s night.” Your first draft of this kind of “opposite” poem will likely need a little polishing, but this is a fun way to respond to a poem you like, while also learning how that poem’s rhetorical strategies really work. (It’s sort of like taking a radio apart and putting it back together, but for poetry).
stay right where you are and feel nothing.
Satan is silent as he destroys us,
then loudly runs away from us in broad daylight.
These are the shouted words we cannot hear:
You, sitting in the safety of your own knowing,
stay right where you are and feel nothing.
Embody nothing but your solitude.
Fizzle like a candle whose wax is spent
and I will hide in your darkness.
Let nothing happen to you: no beauty. no terror.
Just stop now. What you feel is all you will ever feel.
You probably should lose me.
Far off is the country we call death.
You won’t recognize it, for all is frivolity there.
Let go of my hand.
Leaflet of Seconds, I 59
defying atrophy 