Category: Prompts

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 of quiet mountains. He took us

with him. Swaying as one. At the break we couldn’t stop

exclaiming, filled with perfect sounds.

 

He thanked everyone who played with him. He walked up to them

during the standing ovation for him and said so.

Five year later he came to Santa Rosa. He let my son play his

Montagnana cello. Yo-Yo said he wanted to play bass as a child,

but his father told him their house was too small.

 

Listening while the children stroked, he thanked the air.

He thanked the children, clapped for their trying.

He thanked our ears and the music showering over them.

—Previously published in The Place of Our Meeting, Finishing Line Press.

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.