Day 6 This is one of those days when I have to build this post in stages; my computer nicknamed Lady Pixy is acting like a bitch,  only giving me increments of 3 consecutive minutes at a time …

My PAD prompt is … “black stone”

Today’s I’m recycling a PAD prompt from a previous year  – probably originally posted the NaPoWriMo site. It is to write a homage to  Cesar Vallejo’s Black Stone on a White Stone.

You can treat this many ways:

  • Mimic the tone
  • Create an erasure poem
  • Use the poem as a framework – replace the adjectives and nouns
  • Write a poem responding to his, creating a conversation.
  • Use coupling – interspersing his line with your own
  • Use a stanza as an epigraph.
  • Write about your future death; go dark, have fun with it! We all gotta go somehow & your real death may be forgotten in the annals of history; make your poetic death epic! (See one of mine, below)

Black Stone On A White Stone
By César Vallejo
I will die in Paris with a rainstorm,
on a day I already remember,
I will die in Paris—and I don’t shy away—
perhaps on a Thursday, as today is, in autumn.

It will be Thursday, because today, Thursday, as I prose
these lines, I’ve put on my humeri in a bad mood,
and, today like never before, I’ve turned back,
with all of my road, to see myself alone.

César Vallejo has died; they kept hitting him,
everyone, even though he does nothing to them,
they gave it to him hard with a club and hard

also with a rope; witnesses are
the Thursday days and the humerus bones,
the solitude, the rain, the roads. . .

Translated by Rebecca Seiferle

 

Other PAD challenges are …

I have uploaded my Pinterest “Ariel’s List” for April if you want to use those.

So today’s prompt is from 2011.

Want to see what else is from 2011? How about my original response to it?

Day 2 of National Poetry Month by Ariel

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