September's challenge pounced out of nowhere (where did the rest of the month GO?) so maybe that's why I laughed when I read our task:
"write a poem using ponderous, or an image of a hippo, in whatever form we wish!"
Ok, I had to think quickly, about ponderous things! What to do? How to frame this? Where even to start?
Well, that's always the question, no matter how much or how little time I have...right? So I leaned on my never-fail poetry approach: research. It's not something we discuss much when teaching poetic technique, as we focus on rhythm, imagery, word choice, and perhaps form, or even rhyme. But poetry must also be rooted before it can grow, and for me, that means digging into the connections my subject makes with the world. This time, that was two-fold: the word origin of ponderous (and other pond words)...and hippos, of course.
Research always saves the day.
Research
If a poet in a pond
were to ponder,
what ponderous
thoughts to weigh?
That “to pond” is to pool water;
nothing to do with poundage,
still, arising from pound—
a place to hold livestock— so a water
version of that, to hold ducks, say.
Or carp. Or a poet floating
on her back to see what’s up
there, wondering who, in dialect, turned
pound into pond. So she can now write
about ponding, a hazard of low water
at the dip of a path, or even make jokes
about pond scum, also called frog-spittle,
and joy! brook-silk….and yet, to ponder
is another thing, entirely: to think, to consider,
to weigh carefully. This she must do.
Not simply float. Perhaps if she contemplates
the hippo. Now her thoughts bolt from her wet
coils of hair. To be a river-horse! To cry
questions that carry through both water
and air. To word-gallop as it can,
startling all, the terror of the mangroves,
mating underwater, birthing crocodile
killers, not a ponderous bone
in its body of work. What then?
What might pool in her ears? What might
she say to her pod, her herd, her dale,
her bloat? What if this pond weren’t
all the world she knows?
----Sara Lewis Holmes (all rights reserved)
See what my poetry sisters did with this ponderous challenge here:
Kelly
Rebecca
Andi
Poetry Friday is hosted today by Jone Rush MacCulloch.
