The Write Spot Blog by Marlene Cullen

Today’s writing prompt is a poem. You can write on the theme or mood of the poem, a stanza, a line, or a word to inspire your writing. Just Write! Yo-Yo Ma by Donna Emerson He played twenty years ago at Tanglewood. We sat in the first row, still as the moment after rain. Air full of ozone under an enormous white tent for his perfect baroque bowing, for his move into the music, his calm, restrained stroke.   People stood in the aisles. Yo-Yo’s strong bow arm reached front, his body tilted back. His face, shoulders, then body transformed into his cello and song.   His excited strumming. Plucking like a mad man. His confident leaning, his fond embrace of his old cello. We stopped breathing in the piano parts, our breaths pure when they burst out during the double fortissimo.   Fully felt notes. Deep bells on tops…

Today’s writing prompt is a poem. You can write on the theme or mood of the poem, a stanza, a line, or a word to inspire your writing. Just Write!   A Letter to My Sister During Drought by Donna Emerson In this fourth year of drought, California trees begin to fall. Orchards of almonds lie on their sides near Fresno. Rows of apricot trees black, bent.   Remember when we listened to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons? Only one season here: red summer hum. Our cedars shrivel. We are ankle-deep in flat brown leaves.   Even my wrists are wrinkled. I’ve heard about your illnesses, which you said your guru would protect, though he died five years ago.   It’s been fifteen years since Dad’s memorial, twenty since mother’s, when you changed your name, wrote your last letter “releasing me from your life.”   I know you can’t see the water…