Believe it or not, the subject of my poem came to me as I pulled into my driveway yesterday afternoon.  Well, Laurel helped out a little by writing a poem about the Kliedescope unfolding of her lilacs.  My lilacs still look like winter-dead sticks.

Today’s challenge: write a poem that takes the form of a dialogue. Your conversant could be real people, or be personifications, as in Andrew Marvell’s A Dialogue Between the Soul and the Body, or Yeats’ A Dialogue of Self and Soul. Like Marvell, and Yeats, you could alternate stanzas between your two speakers, or perhaps you could give them alternating lines. Your speakers could be personifications, like those in Marvell and Yeats’ poems, or they could be two real people. Hopefully, this prompt will give you a chance to represent different points of view in the same poem, or possibly to create a dramatic sense of movement and tension within the poem.

 

Microclimate is a Real Thing

Did you ship in the snow?

Why do you ask? It’s Christmas you know.

I’m dumbfounded, nothing to say.

There’s no snow elsewhere, not even a mile away.

We live in a microclimate, that’s what I say.

Where’s the crocuses and daffodils? We see them below.

Leaves cling to oaks, meaning spring is delayed.

Two maybe three weeks of winter to go.

Warm weather eludes us, I’m afraid.

We live in a microclimate, I told you it’s so.

What that? juncos and grosbeak and orange tanagers here;

River snakes visit,feigning rattlesnake power.

Always something different, it seems rather queer.

The flora, the fauna. It’s the slope, soil, or the water.

We live in a microclimate. It’s different here.