Winter Flooding

Okay, Word Daddy is missing in action. He must be on another one of his cross-country road trips. I hope his motorcycle breaks down and leaves him stranded in Tucumcari. Sorry, I shouldn’t be mean. I decided to hang out with the Golden Shovel Poems in October. What can I do with a missing muse and so many great poets in the world? I’ve used William Blake, Robert Frost, and Amy Lowell for inspiration. He was an interesting man. He proposed to Maud Gonne four times, and she repeatedly turned him down. When that didn’t work, Yeats proposed to her daughter. She also turned him down. Yeats was the first Irish person to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Therefore, this new poem will be titled Winter Flooding.

 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. Now, I am having fun writing Golden Shovel Poetry.

The rules for writing a Golden Shovel Poem and  Winter Flooding

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. Currently, I will use poems by William Butler Yeats.

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.

Now that I’ve finished using Yeat’s poem, The Second Coming, I plan to play with When You Are Old. The images in this poem are less dark and more romantic. I never like to back down from a challenge. I will title this poem Winter Flooding.

Winter Flooding 

There comes a time for changing and
Like a tree in the wind bending
Leafless branches fall down
To lay on the ground beside
The babbling water and the
Nakedness was once glowing
With blazing color and golden bars
Now, the brook only whispers a murmur
In the winter silence of a 
Frozen bank overflowing little
Flooding carried sadly
To whisper secrets and how
The branches sacrificed for love
And for passions play the water fled

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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.

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