If you wish to attend the read around (t’s free, fun, a great way to share, and reading a poem is optional). Note: If you registered already, you do not need to register again, simply use the link sent to you in your confirmation email. Register Here:

Next Read-Around is 5/2/2024 at 5:00 PM PST

How It Works:

  1. Read the poem 

  2. Do your own reflection on it, noting what it inspires in you

  3. Feel free to use your own reflection as your prompt or…

  4. Use the selection of prompts below

  5. Pick one that inspires you and write (feel free to use only one or write several poems using different prompts) or…

  6. Don’t use any of the provided prompts and follow your inspiration from wherever it comes

(Parable Poem Continued)

of winter-coming in her mane
or the sound of winter-leaving in her mane——
yes, that sound——a liquid shushing
like the blood-fill of stallion desire she knew once
but crisper, a dry crinkle of fall
leaves. Yes, that sound, as they fill their new wings
then lumber to the canopy to demand
come here, come here, come
here, now come.

If this is a parable you don’t understand,
then, dear human, stop listening for words.
Listen instead for mane, wind, wings,
wind, mane, wings, wings, wings.
The lesson here is of the mare
and of the insects, even of the rooster
puffed and strutting past. Because now,
now there is only one thing worth hearing,
and it is the plea of every living being in that field
we call ours, is the two-word commandment
trilling from the trees: let live, let live, let live.
Can you hear it? Please, they say. Please.
Let us live.

My Thoughts

I typically pass over any poem that cannot easily fit on a single page when selecting prompt poems. I made an exception for Parable by Nickole Brown, partly because it uses metaphor, continuing the theme from last week's poem, Simile, by Rosanna Warren. A simile indicates one thing is “like” another thing. A Parable is a story intended to teach a lesson or provide moral guidance. Browne moves deftly from a string of clichés, (themselves metaphors) in the beginning to a powerful plea for life in the end.  That journey goes through truth from the mouth of a horse to the emergence of cyclic cicadas and what might come from the encounter between the two. She grounds the story in simple sensual moments like feeding the horse with a carrot instead of dangling it in front and forever out of reach. To me, Brown poses questions: what can we know from a world that does not speak in words? What does our body hear from life that we ignore because our ears are bent toward words? She challenges us to listen to what is spoken through the body. And, if we do, she warns us, that we may be overwhelmed by the desperate plea to let us live from the life all around us that we seem bent on destroying.

Parable

Let us not with one stone kill one bird,
much less two. Let us never put a cat
in a bag nor skin them, regardless
of how many ways there are to do so.
And let us never take the bull, especially
by his gorgeous horns. What I mean is

we could watch our tongues or keep
silent. What I mean is we could scrub
the violence from our speech. And if we find
truth in a horse’s mouth, let us bless her

ground-down molars, no matter how
old she is, especially if she was given
as a gift. Again, let’s open her mouth——that of the horse,
I mean——let us touch that interdental space where
no teeth grow, where the cold bit was made to grip.
Touch her there, gently now, touch that gentle

empty between her incisors and molars, rub her
aching, vulnerable gums. Don’t worry: doing so calms her.
Besides, she’s old now; she’s what we call
broken; she won’t bite. She’s lived through
two thirteen-year emergences of cicadas

and thought their rising a god infestation,
thought each insect roiling up an iteration
of the many names of god, because god to her is
the grasses so what comes up from grass is
god. She would not say it that way. Nor would she

say the word cicada——words are hindrances
to what can be spoken through the body, are
what she tolerates when straddled,
giddy-up on one side then whoa on the other. After,
it’s all good girl, Mable, good girl,
before the saddle sweat is rinsed cool
with water from the hose and a carrot is offered
flat from the palm. Yes, words being

generally useless she listens instead
to the confused rooster stuttering when the sun
burns overhead, when it’s warm enough
for those time-keepers to tunnel up from the
dark and fill their wings to make them
stiff and capable of flight. To her, it is the sound

(continued in next block)

Copyright © 2024 by Nickole Brown. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 28, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.

Prompt Ideas

  1. Pick a cliché or a set of clichés to use as your prompt.

  2. Journal or write a poem that uses the phrase “what I mean to say is…” after a few sentences or to make leaps or transitions.

  3. Journal or write a poem about a time when you felt you had to “watch your tongue.”

  4. What would the world be like if we scrubbed violence from our speech? If the world is too much, pare it down to: what would happen if you scrubbed violence from your speech?

  5. Journal or write a poem about some truth you might get straight from a horse’s mouth? Or write about horses or about an experience with a horse.

  6. Journal or write a a poem about the cyclic emergence of cicadas.( Illinois will witness the emergence of both 13 and 17 year cyclic cicadas this year.)

  7. Journal or write a poem about what your body hears from the world around you. Or consider what specific body parts (the lungs, shins, shoulders, stomach, etc.) might hear from the world.

  8. In what way are words hindrances to what can be spoken through the body? In what way do words control us.

  9. As usual, write about anything else in the poem or in life that inspires you.