NPM 2024: Day 2

It's a gloomy, gray/grey morning here in Kampala, but it's a holiday from work, so I'm appreciating it anyway. Today's link has been open even longer than yesterday's, because Linda posted it in 2021. (I'm doing some poetic spring-cleaning during NPM, posting poems from tabs on my desktop that have been open for too long and now need to be closed.)

 

The first thing I noticed about this poem is that it's by Russell Hoban, best known by me for the Frances books, like Bread and Jam for Frances. I can imagine the conversation in the poem happening between Frances and her dad. The poem starts like this: 

Jigsaw Puzzle

by Russell Hoban

My beautiful picture of pirates and treasure

is spoiled, and almost I don't want to start

to put it together; I've lost all the pleasure

I used to find in it: there's one missing part. 

You can read what happened here.

Last month was our poetry month at school; kids and teachers were presented with 31 prompts, one for each day of the month. Although I didn't much like most of the poems I wrote to those prompts, I was pleased that I wrote so much in March. The "don't break the chain" strategy works very well to motivate me, and especially when others will see what I did (I'm an Obliger, in the Four Tendencies model created by Gretchen Rubin - you can read more about that here). Below is one I wrote for the prompt "I thought." 

I thought


I thought at the beginning
that I knew the end.
I thought I knew that guy’s name
but confused him with his friend.
I thought I knew the lyrics,
but it was a different song.
So many things I used to think:
It turns out I was wrong.

©Ruth Bowen Hersey

Sadly I can't read today's line for the Progressive Poem because my system doesn't let me go there. Yes, I've tried from other networks and using other browsers, but I just can't access Jone's blog from Uganda. But you probably can, so go here for line 2: Jone's blog.