Flipped Serendipity

A guide for the unwary.
                        Rivers,
the longing of the earth for the sea
To seek the soft within the hard
in the tears of an actor
                         pretending
       that it’s still just an act
as gentle as the waves amidst a storm.
   The song.

NaPoWriMo 2023. On the words, generator, river, oyster, salt, and song.

The Romanian-born poet Paul Celan once wrote a series of surrealist questions and answers.

Today’s prompt asks you to begin by picking 5-10 words from the following list. Next, write out a question for each word that you’ve selected (e.g., what is seaweed?)

owl
generator
fog
river
clove
miracle
cyclops
oyster
mercurial
seaweed
gutter
artillery
salt
elusive
thunder
ghost
acorn
cheese
longing
cowbird
truffle
quahog
song

Now for each question, write a one-line answer. Try to make the answer an image, and don’t worry about strict logic. These are surrealist answers, after all!

After you’ve written out your series of questions and answers, place all the answers, without the questions, on a new page. See if you can make a poem of just the answers. You may find that what you have is very beautifully mysterious, and somehow has its own logic.

NaPoWriMo 2023 April 2 prompt