Wednesday Writing Prompt

Your fortnightly writing prompt.

AWE WALKS

On Monday Helena Nelson spoke of awe walks. “I heard a radio talk about ‘awe’ walks as a way of boosting the spirits, and realised I’d been doing them without knowing. On an ‘awe’ walk you deliberately look for one thing to marvel at, on a walk of any length. I usually photograph whatever it is. Sometimes it’s cloud formations. Sometimes weird fungi. Sometimes the colour of new grass. Or frost melting on a leaf. Snowberries on a bare twig.”

For today’s prompt I offer a photograph of a spider’s web. This is what you see on you “awe walk” whilst out on your own. Maybe you took the wrong path, got lost for a while, or quietly decided to creep away. There is a moment of doubt as to where to go next…

Poems or lines from poems can be shared in the comments. The submissions window for poems as part of the creativity in lockdown project opens later in the spring.

Jeremy Page: Featured Poet

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CLOSE SEASON

They say it smells of dead holidays.
I say it always did.  And out of season
was never the time to connect anything
with anything here, where you can only
wonder at the sea in all the shades
of grey on Richter’s palette, wonder
where the ice-cream vendors go
and if the deckchair man can really
hibernate in his cave beneath the cliff,
with his chairs, his memories of summer.

On the pier a salt breeze ruffles
a scrap of gaudy poster,  and offshore,
somewhere close, a ship’s bell tolls
for something gone, for some thing .

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Jeremy Page has edited The Frogmore Papers since 1983.  His short stories have been published in magazines like Ambit, Citizen 32 and The Interpreter’s House, and he is the author of several collections of poems, most recently In and Out of the Dark Wood (HappenStance, 2010).  His work has been translated into German and Romanian, and a selection of his poems was recently broadcast on Radio Romania Cultural in English and Romanian.  His own translations of Catullus are published by Ashley Press as The Cost of All Desire.  His play Loving Psyche was staged in Bremen in 2010.

Publications:

The Cost of All Desire: after Catullus (Ashley Press, 2011) available through good bookshops, from Skylark in Lewes, or by post (£5.00) from: The Frogmore Press, 21 Mildmay Road, Lewes BN7 1PJ.

In and Out of the Dark Wood (HappenStance Press, 2010) available from HappenStance (or through good bookshops)

The Alternative Version (Frogmore Press, 2001) available through good bookshops, from Skylark in Lewes, or by post (£4.95) from: The Frogmore Press, 21 Mildmay Road, Lewes BN7 1PJ.

Secret Dormitories (Crabflower Pamphlets, 1993) out of print

Bliss (Crabflower Pamphlets, 1989) out of print

Peter Daniels: Featured Poet

Mice

In the yellow water pail
two blue mice are floating.
They splashed through my sleep
last night, and I ignored them.

On the porch, three more mice
lie in the bottom of a dry pail,
withered, with a few old leaves,
and a scattering of droppings.

One mouse looks nibbled,
keeping the others alive
to chase the walls a while
inside the plastic drum.

How long before they died?
We could lie in wait and
count how many fall in:
but simpler to set some traps.

I throw the crisp mice out,
and this morning’s two
wet and bloated ones,
with the water they drowned in,

scrape out the bucket of dried
mouseturds under the pump:
remember tonight
to keep the lid down on the water.

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Peter Daniels has twice won the Poetry Business pamphlet competition, in 1991 and 1999, and came first in the 2002 Ledbury, the 2008 Arvon, and the 2010 TLS and Ver Poets competitions. He returned to pamphlets with Work & Food from Mulfran Press in 2010, and Mr Luczinski Makes a Move is forthcoming from HappenStance in 2011. As well as his own poems he is working on translations from the Russian of Vladislav Khodasevich. Peter lives in Stoke Newington, London.