Hello Everyone and Welcome to our first Prosery prompt of the year, where poetry and flash fiction collide.

For those of you new to dVerse, here are the rules:

Write a story of 144 words or less (not including the title). The story must have a beginning and an end, and should not be poetry. Sounds easy enough right? Here’s the twist: You must use the poetry line I have given you within your story. You may alter the punctuation, but you must use the line in its entirety. 

Today, I have chosen the following line taken from Spring Azures from the book Wild Geese by Mary Oliver:

‘Sometimes the great bones of my life feel so heavy,’

On January 17, 2019 the world lost one of the greatest poet voices of our time- Mary Oliver. Mary was known for her luminous poetry celebrating nature and beauty.

Mary Oliver’s poetry is fine and deep; it reads like a blessing. Her special gift is to connect us with our sources in the natural world, its beauties and terrors and mysteries and consolations.– Stanley Kunitz

From The Poetry Foundation:

Mary Oliver was an “indefatigable guide to the natural world,” wrote Maxine Kumin in the Women’s Review of Books, “particularly to its lesser-known aspects.” Oliver’s poetry focused on the quiet of occurrences of nature: industrious hummingbirds, egrets, motionless ponds, “lean owls / hunkering with their lamp-eyes.” Kumin also noted that Oliver “stands quite comfortably on the margins of things, on the line between earth and sky, the thin membrane that separates human from what we loosely call animal.” Oliver’s poetry won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and a Lannan Literary Award for lifetime achievement.Reviewing Dream Work (1986) for the Nation, critic Alicia Ostrikernumbered Oliver among America’s finest poets, as “visionary as [Ralph Waldo] Emerson.”

If you want to read Spring Azures and an interpretation thereof, here is a link. 

Mary Oliver’s Spring Azures: A Farewell to Darkness

So that’s it, dear writers. I look forward to reading your lush stories!

When you’ve written and posted your story to your blog, add your link to the Mr. Linky widget below, and then visit the other poets’ pages and read and comment on their work. Also, be sure to link back to dVerse so others can join in as well!