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The link to join with audio and video will be embedded in the OLN prompt on Thursday, August 15th.

It’s Monday and, at the dVerse Poets Pub, we are writing Prosery, the very short piece of prose or flash fiction that tells a story with a beginning, middle and end. It can be in any genre of your choice, but it does have a limit of 144 words; an additional challenge is to hit 144 exactly. The special thing about Prosery is that we give you a complete line or two from a poem, which must be included somewhere in your story, within the 144-word limit.

When I was a teenager, I became enthralled with the poetry of Leonard Cohen, and I still have four of his collections. I knew he was also a singer, but wasn’t that taken with his voice or the style of his songs. At the time, I was already in love with Joni Mitchell, but didn’t know much about her personal life, or that she had had a relationship with Cohen. But I found traces of Cohen in her lyrics.

One poem that I thought was very lyrical was ‘Take this Waltz’, and I was interested to find out that he had put it to music.

One of the things I liked about this poem is that it was ‘after Lorca’, which sent me on a search for the poem that inspired Cohen, and I noticed that he had imitated some of the structure and imagery from Lorca’s ‘Little Viennese Waltz’.

So it’s down to Lorca that this poem is set in Vienna, one of my most favourite places in the world, and that it’s a waltz.

However, Lorca’s poem is much darker than Cohen’s. For example, the little girls in Lorca’s poem become pretty women, and the ‘book of death’ becomes a scrapbook.

The lines I have chosen for you to include in your Prosery are:

“And I’ll bury my soul in a scrapbook,
with the photographs there and the moss.”

Here’s how to take part in Prosery: