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Alicanto

***Announcement***
Please join us at dVerse LIVE with Björn on Saturday, December 6, from 10 to 11 AM EST (NYT.) Come sit in on our LIVE (video and audio) session. We welcome everyone to read aloud a poem of your choosing, join in the informal conversation OR simply sit in and listen. We’re a friendly bunch…..the more the merrier! Hope to see you Saturday! Look for the link to join at Thursday’s OpenLinkNight prompt.

Hello to All who are gathered here today in the dVerse Universe, a place of pubtalk and poetry. I am your host, Lisa, ready to serve drinks and snacks from the Tastiness Cupboard. This is Poetics Tuesday, where you will be prompted to write a poem in any form, style, or length to a given topic, which I’m about to lay out before you in all of its expansive glory. In order to go there, let’s revisit some Poetics prompts from 2023 and 2024:

My prompt on April 4, 2023, Menagerie, asked for a poem about animal nature, how humans exhibit other animals’ natures, or creating an animal myth.

SarahSouthwest’s (may she rest in peace) May 30, 2023 prompt, Acting Like Animals where you choose from a given list of animal words that have been adopted to apply to human attributes.

Melissa Lemay’s December 12, 2023 prompt, December Point of View where you channel one of the given animals or have a conversation with one of them.

Dora’s July 23, 2024 prompt, Running with Horses where you write about what horses mean to you.

Do you see where I’m going with this? Maybe. But maybe not. As if there weren’t already enough real animals and human connections with them, over time we have conjured our own mythological creatures that fascinate, charm, stalk, and always teach us.

I went to wikipedia and found a list of, Legendary Creatures by Type and was impressed by how many there are. They are further categorized into Arthropods, Birds, Mammals, Reptiles, Megafauna, Artificial Creatures, Creatures Associated with Body Parts, Creatures Associated with Concepts, Demons, Creatures Associated with Elements, Creatures Associated with Habitats, Humanoids, Hybrids, Creatures Associated with Astronomical Objects, World, Creatures Associated with Plants, Shapeshifters, Creatures Associated with Times, Undead, and Miscellaneous! What thrills me most about them is that they spring from our imaginations and come from a belief that every thing in existence is alive and has sentience.

The following excerpts from poems about a few of the creatures add their own polish to the concepts (to see image enlarged click on it):


Kraken

From "The Kraken" by Alfred Lord Tennyson:

Below the thunders of the upper deep;
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee...


Garuda

From The Suparṇākhyāna, believed to be from the late Vedic Period, about the Divine Bird, Garuda:

...Shout, thunder, reach the clouds; these 
waters of thine shall be level with the 
mountain-tops... Undefined, wholly water, 
the shore shall be: the frog-female shall 
croak all the night. (The winds) shall milk
the cloud (cow) whose trail drips with milk, 
the wild beast shall come seeking firm land...


Undine

from Undine by Nicole Cooley

...She has come to land before.
She knows the urgency of 
the fisherman’s hands, that breath
in her ear.  She leaves
an umbrella of hair on each pillow,
a shadow pale as a fish…

Dear Poets, I am going to make today’s prompt easy for you (I hope!) by opening it up to the following options:
1) write to any of the previous prompts linked above, using their guidelines
2) follow the wikipedia link and choose one of Legendary Creatures to write about
3) create your own creature using one (or more) of the types wiki categorizes them into
4) take a line from one of the three above excerpts and build a poem around it.

If you choose option one, please give attribution and add the link to the chosen prompt somewhere on your blog. If you choose option four, please give attribution to the poet.

Once again, we have come to the place where you put your proverbial pen to paper and warm it with your poetic spirit’s will in words.

• Pen us a poem using one of the four given options about real or imagined creatures
• Post your piece on your blog and link back to this post. Give attribution, if needed.
• Place the link to your actual post (not your blog url) on the Mister Linky page.
• Don’t forget to check the little box to accept use/privacy policy.
• Please visit other blogs and comment on their posts!

Mr. Linky will be open until Thursday, December 4, at 3pm New York Time.