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
from where you live, but I’d
settle for a silent sitting together
on a bench beside our old pond.
—Previously published in The Place of Our Meeting, Finishing Line Press.
Donna Emerson
Living in Petaluma, California with her husband and daughter, Donna recently retired from teaching at Santa Rosa Jr. College and from her clinical social work practice.
Donna’s recent publications include Calyx, Sanskrit, the Denver Quarterly, The Paterson Literary Review, the New Ohio Review, Weber: the Contemporary West, and the London Magazine.. She has been nominated for a Pushcart, “Best of the Net” and received two Allen Ginsberg awards (2015, 2017). Her four chapbooks include This Water, 2007, Body Rhymes, 2009, Wild Mercy, 2011, and Following Hay, 2013.
Her first full-length poetry collection, The Place of Our Meeting was published in January 2018 by Finishing Line Press. She is currently completing her second full-length book, Beside the Well, to be published by Cherry Grove Collections in December, 2019.
