Let the poetry flow...

So it's the first of April and here comes the joke... I and my friend Maria (check her out at mgoodson.blogspot.co.uk) are doing an ad hoc version of NaPoWriMo and creating a little gem every day this month.  When I say this, I should probably add several disclaimers. Firstly, I cannot write poetry.  Secondly, my writing practice has been woefully neglected over the past, ooh, I don't know, year or so, so that sound you hear is the rust falling from my fingers.  Thirdly, Maria has cheated and ALREADY HAS HAD A POEM PUBLISHED, a fact that she neglected to mention and has me running scared already - and I've only been typing this for five minutes and fourthly, did I mention that I can't write poetry?

The locked bridge

I heard today of a bridge in Paris.
Somebody sometime turned a key
In a lock and walked away.

Now it is covered in locks,
Woven through the unblinking struts,
Above the unseeing water.
 
The love rusting slowly,
Ever so slowly away.

 So, there you have it.  My aim is to write a poem, a first draft and nothing more (that's why it's so short, it's not like I'm going for a five page ballad in ten minutes) and to do it at 4 a.m which is when I get up to do my uni work before the day begins and the children wake, chickens need cleaning out and 8 a.m work gets ever closer.  My hope is that in 30 days time (and that is assuming I manage to do this on a four day camping trip with a four and six year old later in the month but I'm not thinking about that just yet...), I will have carved some 'me' writing time out for myself within my academic writing timetable and I can return to the characters who I left a long time ago in a place far away who even now still whisper to me ever so often that they want their story finished.  Juniper, Quil and Fenwick - I'm still listening!

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