Napo 5 and 6

I promise I wrote NAPO 5. I wrote a villanelle, as instructed, about Trump "tilting at windmills." Because it's a villanelle, I probably won't completely overhaul it in revision, so I'm not going to post it here on my blog. I will, however, post the first stanza just for accountability:

Tilting at Windmills

Why are you so afraid of windmills, Don?

Do you imagine that they’re giants, too?

Their turbines usher in the coming dawn

Which brings me to NAPO 6, today's prompt. The instructions were to write a "what if" poem. I started out thinking about what would happen if we were immortal. How would that change the nature of our love? 

And then I took it in another direction entirely:

Love Song for a Plastic Grocery Bag

If love floated like a plastic grocery bag

Over the city, catching sunrays and gulf wind

In its open mouth; if it bloomed perpetual,

The only flower you can count on,

white against the green spring prairies,

or flourishing beneath the autumn trees,

refusing to decay like the fallen oak leaves,

if it filled the ocean, more plentiful than fish,

if it could survive any apocalypse—asteroid,

volcano, rising seas; if even whale’s stomachs

couldn’t digest this; if it threatened to drown

us all in its over-jealousness; if it was cheap

and easy and convenient; if it helped us carry

the burden of daily existence from car to cupboard;

then let the world drown in it,

the scraps of it, the tatters of it—

oh, for the love of God, recycle

this love kind so it may live again.