Today’s poem prompts were “train” and “message.” I was wandering through the long grasses of the long A sound in train, and ended up at the Amazingville Station. One day, years ago, when the poetry was so heady and giddy I could hardly keep from floating away, someone wrote on someone else’s poem, “You are sleeping with everyone in Amazingville,” and Mara wrote a poem beginning with that phrase. I have wanted so terribly to travel again to Amazingville, so I figured out today that perhaps you need to take the train.
Someone in one of my groups said he likes this poem, but he doesn’t really understand it, which it exactly how I feel, too. I responded with this, and maybe it makes a little more sense to me now: “I’m not sure I understand it, actually. My seven and seven is the final two lines that turn the haiku to tanka, so the haiku is perhaps a summoning spell, a way to bring me back to Amazingville, too, and I will finish the incantation with my two lines of sevens.”
Here’s the weirdness, and then a video of last year’s Easter Magdalene poem:
Taking the Train to Amazingville
by Beth Weaver-Kreider
When you get off the train at Amazingville Station,
send me a message that you have arrived.
Make it a five seven five, American haiku,
and let the cutting word be one that sets me free.
Then bring me around with the sweet music,
the alluring scent of your season word.
Call me home with haiku and I’ll come to you
on the next train, with my seven and seven.
Mockingbird Chronicles 