The artist formerly known as my wife is the poet laureate of our town. A little while ago she hosted an event that featured a bunch of people reading poems by other people. And she added a wrinkle: during the course of the reading, audience members were to write down lines that caught their attention. After all the poems had been read, the audience would compose a poem made of lines we liked, spoken aloud in an order that made sense to us.
Such a great idea! I didn’t record the audience-generated poem, but I did keep the lines that J. (my 10-year-old son) wrote down. They are:
I went looking for my childhood.
Why empty the house when it can’t be emptied?
Why must we die to live and live to die?
We curse money.
A grand old heron, its wings spread to eternity.