Think back to where you lived ten years ago. Look out your favourite window there. What do you see? What season is it? Perhaps it's raining. What does it smell like? What do you hear? Are you wearing shoes? Close your eyes and for five minutes look out that window.
For me, this poem emerged.
May Street, 2003
I sink into my second-hand couch,
bare feet curled under for comfort and warmth
considering the concrete square of my backyard.
Last autumn's litters of leaves
lurk around pots of greenery
reaching out thirsty tongues
to suck up the nourishment
of a spring shower.
Voices now, loud and urgent.
Car doors click and slam.
Motor - blub, blub, blub,
disturbs my reverie,
then dies a lingering death.
I sink back into the jazzy waft
of my neighbour's music,
smile as my kitten paw-boxes
a dance across the square
after an invisible butterfly.
Now look out another window in some other year. It hasn't rained for weeks. Close your eyes, look, write.
Te Waerenga Road, 1978
Huddled beside the old radiogram
close enough that my Mum
doesn't get annoyed by the noise,
I listen to my favourite record story.
No longer here in spirit
my ears hear somewhere
a droning, occasionally coughing,
spluttering
into silence.
Then again, the drone...
I am with the happy prince
and the shivering swallow.
The sun pouring itself
through the windowpane
does not warm me up at all.
Bang! My head jerks to
my bikini-topped, shorts-
clad, gumboot-wearing
older sister
pushing the lawn-mower.
She smiles and shouts something
through the thunder right under
the picture window, waves,
and is gone.
I stop the record.
Skip out to the swing.
BY JEANETTE JONES
The above two exercises were taken from "Writing Poems" by Michelle Boisseau and Robert Wallace
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