For the last two years, I’ve used excerpts from poems as prompts for my writing. Here’s one from January, 2025, and the excerpt that prompted it.
I wish I could dig up the earth to plant apples
pears or peaches on a lazy dandelion lawn
I am tired from this digging up of human bodies
no one loved enough to save from death
June Jordan, “Aftermath”, from Naming our Destiny (1989)
It’s not that no one loved you
my love
It’s that you were torn from that
loving place
by some perceived or invented (deceitful, artificial)
necessity
some fold in reality
held in place
by an arbitrary need
to win and lord over
your ways and so
love
was out of the question
and if you had it
surrounding you
it had to be removed
so that you’d feel alone
submissive humbled depressed
or too afraid to argue or escape
enacted again and again
this is how the bodies
get buried
as if without love
when really the love
has just been deliberately,
systematically removed, outlawed,
denied until
you forget it is there
you think you’re alone
when you never
ever were
only your capacity to sense that
was muffled, dulled, blunted
by lies and abuse
your own love dripping
with blood & tears
into the earth
that never stopped loving you
and holding you up
although
it became impossible to tell
until you lay once more
in her embrace
