mary_j_59

Soemthing we did together in writing club - I had fun with this one! Enjoy.

It was a dark and stormy night.

Sturm und Drang. Yet again Sturm und Drang, thought the man sitting on the floor in front of the legless piano. "God Damn!" he muttered to himself. "I just saw lighting, but I can't even hear the thunder. No, not even that."

But then a sharp crack and a sound like tearing filled the room. The man smiled. He wasn't deaf, after all. Not quite.

Ludwig turned to the piano and began playing the storm.

(crossposted from my author page)

Patricia Dunn, author of “Rebels by Accident”, came to our creative writing class last spring and did some really neat writing prompts. This autumn, I tried her method again. One of the prompts was “hunger is a mountain”. This is what I came up with.



Hunger is a Mountain

(A Writing Prompt)


What does this mean? How can a mountain be hungry? It grows and dies so very slowly, and when does it ever eat? What feeds it?

I can’t imagine being in a mountain’s skin. One of the old, metamorphic mountains of New England. Every summer, hordes of tourists and locals climb through its green, damp woods and cross its streams. They are hungry, as the wild creatures are hungry, for the little dark berries that grow on the bushes ringing the mountain’s bald crown. They call it Blueberry Mountain.


The mountain is generous. It feeds the foxes, the chipmunks, the squirrels, the porcupines and birds and deer and people. The people climb up hopefully and walk down again carrying buckets full of blueberries. Then they eat. They eat blueberry muffins, blueberry dumplings, blueberry turnovers, blueberry pies, blueberries with cream and ice cream. They eat blueberries fresh and frozen and canned. And every time they eat, they think of the mountain and how they’ll go back the next summer and pick blueberries again.

I just tweaked this a bit, and would appreciate comments; it may need a rewrite. Behind a cut because it's a bit grim (and to hide it from anyone that hates poetry, especially free verse!)
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I am rather upset about the state of the world - the world news, of course, is beyond horrible. I don't even want to comment on it. But I've also been reading about the plagiarism debacle in the Harry Potter fandom, and this has persuaded me that, in general, it is a very poor idea to put one's original works online. One of the boys in writing club wanted me to post the revisions of a couple of fairy tales I've been working on. But I do hope to publish them someday, so, even though very few people read this journal, I don't want to take the risk.

However, there is one original work which I think deserves an audience, and which is not likely to be published elsewhere - it does not fit in with the book of poems I'm working on, and I can't imagine anyone stealing a poem, in any case. There's no profit in it. So - because of the state of the world - I am going to post this one poem. It was written in 2004, after the Abu Ghraib scandal, and is copyrighted to me - Mary Johnson.
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