What Might Have Been

It’s true, I decided to switch things up a bit in August. I will continue to write Golden Shovel but move on to Robert Frost. Frost dropped out of college twice but earned more than 40 honorary degrees. That is the smart way to go to college, but he had to win four Pulitzer Prizes for poetry to accomplish the task. He read a poem at JFK’s presidential inauguration. I switched gears in August. Robert Frost is my new poet guy because he has a way with words. Therefore, this new poem will be titled Memories of What Might Have Been.

Terrance Hayes invented the Golden Shovel style of poetry.  This form of found poetry allows the writer to take a favorite poem and use it to make something original. I experimented with found poetry last year when I wrote Blank Verse poems. In the month of July, I focused on  William Blake’s poems. Blake and I are breaking up.

The rules for writing a Golden Shovel Poem and  What Might Have Been

While researching this style of poetry created by Terrance Hayes, there seem to be four simple rules. You can use as many lines of the poem as you want, and the poem will end with you being your creation. I find this idea interesting. Written below are the three simple rules.

1). Choose a poem that you like. I currently I will use poems by Robert Frost.

2)Use each word in the line or lines as the end word in your poem. Make sure they stay in order.

3) Construct an entire poem around them. The meaning doesn’t have to be the same.

4) Give the original poet credit who wrote the line or lines you used.

In this poetic adventure, I will use poems written by Robert Frost. This small poem I call What Might Have Been.  It will consist of the end of lines taken from Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken.

What Might Have Been 

I live in this place because
I got so blasted tired of it
All the bright illusions that was
Filled with concrete not the grassy
Rolling corn fields of summer and
Lacked the very things I wanted
I woke and found myself worse for wear

Sometimes I wonder though
I might have been brilliant as
The future I hungered for
In the conflict, I imagine that
I might have allowed the
Opportunities of life passing
Me by when I moved from there

Sometimes I wish I had
Traveled a path so worn
Between myself and them
But then I believe that really
The unknown is what this is about
The mystery of what might have been and the
Fact that my fate would have come out the same

Who is Molly Shea?

Molly Shea is an accomplished fictional short story writer from Indiana who writes short stories and novels about a fictional town called Tecumseh.  To read more of her short stories and adventures, click here.

Be sure to follow Molly on Twitter!