Wondrous to Behold
a writing prompt for you to use this week
I started this writing prompt introduction several times, trying to find the right hook to lead into a poem I found this week. I knew immediately I wanted to share the poem with you, but how to introduce it?
One intro was about the books my mother read to me and my sisters growing up.
One intro was about the word wondrous and making a personal list of what you find to be wondrous.
One intro was about grief and how it multiplies, as do my prayers for those of you I know walking through fresh grief now.
One intro was about the way memory works, all of a sudden, in a rush like the one sentence of the poem.
Then I realized that some poems don’t need a hook or an introduction, or a writing prompt spelled out (though I couldn’t resist a list all the same.)
I know this poem—wondrous in its own way—will provide just the right starting place for your writing to go wherever it needs to go this week.
Wondrous
—by Sarah Freligh
I’m driving home from school when the radio talk
turns to E.B. White, his birthday, and I exit
the here and now of the freeway at rush hour,
travel back into the past, where my mother is reading
to my sister and me the part about Charlotte laying her eggs
and dying, and though this is the fifth time Charlotte
has died, my mother is crying again, and we’re laughing
at her because we know nothing of loss and its sad math,
how every subtraction is exponential, how each grief
multiplies the one preceding it, how the author tried
seventeen times to record the words She died alone
without crying, seventeen takes and a short walk during
which he called himself ridiculous, a grown man crying
for a spider he’d spun out of the silk thread of invention —
wondrous how those words would come back and make
him cry, and, yes, wondrous to hear my mother’s voice
ten years after the day she died — the catch, the rasp,
the gathering up before she could say to us, I’m OK.
from The Sun Magazine, Issue 440
More
To read the letter E.B. White wrote to his editor explaining his choices of a spider and a pig for the leading characters in his novel, and to see some of his illustrated notes, read this article from The Marginalian.
I’d love to know where Wondrous took you. Share your thoughts or writing in the comments. Also feel free to share this post and the prompt with someone you think might enjoy it.
My first online writing hour for paid subscribers is happening this Saturday, October 22. If you want to try writing on Zoom in company with me and others, you can upgrade for a month and check it out ($7), then change back to a free subscription, and I won’t mind, I promise….