On to actually-today’s prompt! I really like this one, and riding high off the concert I went to last night I am freshly inspired by song lyrics.

There’s one good thing that came of my friends all ditching me a few years ago. It gave me some new trauma to delve into with my art. Before, the only tragedy that ever followed me through my life was my father’s death when I was young. I had a period of isolation and ostracization after that happened, and then I made some really great, fantastic, wonderful close friends. For 15 years…and then it all fell apart, and I still don’t quite understand the role I played in it all. Introspection has helped me improve myself, and I have some new friends, but they aren’t at the level of those old friendships. Not yet. So the hurt is still pretty strong.

Poem prompt: “Our resource for the day is a bit goofy. It’s the Gallery of Strange Museums. Some of the museums here don’t strike me as all that strange – more very local or specific. But the Wingnut Museum is definitely a bit odd, as is the World’s Largest Spool of Thread (less a museum than a roadside attraction), while the Hattiesburg Pocket Museum is a testament to the fact that people can – and do – make their own fun.

And now for our daily prompt – optional as always. This one is inspired by Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s poem ‘Song.’

The word ‘tragedy’ comes from the Greek for ‘goat song.’ The song in Kelly’s poem is quite literally a goat song. The poem also describes a tragedy, both in the modern sense of an awful event, and the ancient dramatic sense of a play in which someone does something terrible, and the play’s action shows the consequences.

The poem has a timeless, could-have-happened-anywhere/anywhen quality that I associate with blues and folk ballads – including murder ballads (a subgenre of song dealing with a gruesome crime, first arising from broadsheet ballads sold at English executions, and which later came to America in forms like ‘The Knoxville Girl’ and then morphed their way into country music).

Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem that tells a story in the style of a blues song or ballad. One way into this prompt may be to use it to retell a family tragedy or story, or to retell a crime or tragic event that occurred in your hometown.”

Black Roses

I wish I could be glad I lost her 
but I can’t forget or forgive 
that morning when the messenger came 
adorned in black roses, black roses, 
she bathed him in black roses, and thorns 
misted the blood in my guileless eyes. 

She flew away on the wings of ravens, 
but she did that every year. 
I knew there was time, and there was distance, 
but there was soul-sharing and hand-holding too 
and the hope of I’ll see you again someday soon. 
But this time, unlike Hugin, she never returned. 
Then came the vision of black roses. 
The messenger, adorned in black roses. 
She bathed him in black roses, and thorns 
misted the blood in my guileless eyes. 

Little did I know the day before 
what tomorrow would bring. 
She painted Munin’s wings with crude oil 
regurgitated from digested 
honey that once graced her tongue. 
She used the words can’t, and anymore, and 
I wish the best for you 
but that was just a bandage for the gash. 
That was just the single red rose 
transmogrified to black the moment 
my finger touched the stem 
held out by the messenger, the last red 
in the bouquet that bathed him in black 
roses, black roses, all I can see are black roses, 
and thorns that mist blood in my guileless eyes.

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*this poem is about the end of a 15-year-friendship not by my choosing, inspired partly by the flow of the poem "The Highwayman" by Alfred Noyes, and partly by two songs by The Rasmus: "Rest in Pieces" and “Black Roses"