Prompt for Hour Eight

The prompt for hour eight is to write a golden shovel. Not familiar with the form? That is not surprising, it was created in 2010 by the poet Terrance Hayes in his poem The Golden Shovel.

It is pretty simple though. First you take a line or lines from a poem you admire.

Use each word from the line(s) as the end word of each of the lines in your poem. So for example if you used a line with ten words, your poem should be ten lines long.

Keep those words in order.

Give credit to the original poet.

Below is an example. The original line inspiring it is “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone” by W.H. Auden

 

When you asked me yesterday to stop

at the top of the hill and look out at all

the cliffs that form the walls of the

valley, I shook my head and pointed at the clocks.

Now I want nothing more but to cut

work with you, to take every hour off

to be spent on the trail, in a hammock, in the

pool, anything. For the person to be you, on the other side of the ringing telephone.

 

 

4 thoughts on “Prompt for Hour Eight

  1. This is both a golden shovel and a nonet

    a mere brush of your hand and I
    was gullible enough to think
    we were a pair, you and I
    the sweet remarks you made
    hid the bitter you—
    time to wake up
    stop messin’
    with my
    head

    The line I have used is from Sylvia Plath’s “mad girl’s love song”

  2. The following line was taken from “The Death of the Hired Man” by Robert Frost:
    “Home is the Place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

    A Place Where

    I often reminisce about my red-brick row home
    on pencil-thin Sylvester Street where there still is
    a nearby concrete alley where all the
    neighborhood children used to gather, a place
    of seemingly-infinite security where
    we played in peace none of us fully appreciated when/
    we were young, a place in time I am sure you
    would like, a place where even today you’d have
    fun playing catch while listening to
    rock n’ roll music on the radio. I go
    there annually to relive my past. One year, there
    were some childhood friends I met there. They
    shared their fond memories with me. Have
    you such a place in your past, a place to
    return to when you need to wax nostalgic? Take
    mental inventory of the places you
    lived as a child, places where you knew you fit in.

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