prompt: write a golden shovel. find a poem you love, and write a new poem where the last word of each line is from the poem you love such that it can be read in whole by reading the last words in order.
the poem i am golden shovelling:
Don’t surrender your loneliness so quickly.
let it cut more deep.
Let it ferment and season you
as few human or even divine ingredients can.
Something missing in my heart tonight
has made my eyes so soft
my voice so tender
my need of god
absolutely clear.
–Hafiz
the spirits Don’t
speak to me of surrender.
they ask me, what is your
terror of loneliness,
that quiets you so,
stagnates so quickly.
i argue: this a heart’s let,
containing inside it
the places we were cut
when we reached for more
when we opened that deep.
they say you can’t Let
love wither inside. it
would blossom, it would ferment,
turn life to a pleasure and
grow a newish season
from within you.
but…i am steady as
the ocean’s song, only a few
chords off now. so human.
i didn’t resist or
try to break even
with the divine.
i swallowed the ingredients
for magic, as only the faithful can.
they insist there is Something
through what is missing,
a place to get lost in
beyond the gates of my
wild and bordered heart
which shudder tonight.
what the too soon past has
left is a clay made
with the quick tears of my
childish eyes,
the dust (red brown, so
precious, even soft),
the prayers of all my
lives left in my voice
with the memories so
close and tender
but they know. they know of my
newborn known need.
they undulate songs of
a dark and growing god
a changer who loves me absolutely
who makes my faith so clear.