We are already almost halfway through October and, this Monday 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. You may break up the line with punctuation or capitalization, add words to the beginning or end of it, but you cannot insert words within the given line.

Despite them having big families, big appetites and big personalities and being playful, house proud and expert foragers, I hadn’t seen badgers in the wild until recently, when I spotted two – sadly dead by the side of a busy road.

For those of you who are not from the UK, badgers have black and white-striped faces, grey fur and short furry tails. They look like no other UK mammal: they are stocky, powerfully-built omnivores that weigh 10–12kg, with a body length of about 90cm, which makes them the biggest land predator in the UK.

Ideal badger habitat is a mixture of woodland and open country.  They live in a network of underground burrows and tunnels know as setts, which tend to be in the shelter of woodland, with the badgers emerging at night to forage in fields and meadows.

Badgers led me to this poem by Alice Oswald: ‘Body’

Alice Priscilla Lyle Oswald (born 31^st August 1966) is an important but elusive British poet, well-known for blending nature, myth, and lyrical traditions. She trained as a classicist at New College, The University of Oxford.

Her works include The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile, Woods etc., a book of poems about flowers, Weeds and Wild Flowers, a reshaping of The Iliad, and a book-length poem about the people (present and past) and animals that make up the life of a river, entitled Dart, which won the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2002.  She has received other awards such as the Griffin Poetry Prize, Costa Poetry Award, and Ted Hughes Award, and served as Oxford Professor of Poetry from 2019 to 2023.

Oswald’s work is characterised by a quiet, patient attention to voice, including use of dialect. She lives in Devon, where our friend and fellow poet Sarah Connor also lived. 

The lines I chose to include from ‘Body’ in your Prosery are:

“the dead were settling in under their mud roof
and something was shuffling overhead”

Here’s how to take part in Prosery:

• Write a piece of flash fiction of up to or exactly 144 words, including the given line in the order in which it has been given. You may add or change punctuation, but you may not add words in between the given ones.
• Enter a link directly to your poem and your name by clicking Mr Linky below.
• There you will find links to other poets, and more will join, so check back for their poems.
• Read and comment on other poets’ work – we all come here to have our poems appreciated.
• Please link back to dVerse from your site/blog.
• Mister Linky will close on Saturday at 3 p.m. EST.
• Comment and participate in our discussion below, if you like. We are a friendly bunch of poets.
• Have fun.