Willow Poem
A poem based off of Tuesday's prompt!
My process
This week, I decided to try writing sonnets. And, honestly, as a person who shies well away from rhyme or repeating rhythm, it was fun! I even wrote a few stanzas here and there that I liked. It can be very freeing to limit yourself.
That being said, none of my sonnet work felt shareable because…it’s just not good enough. Which is fine! It’s fine that the point of writing the sonnets was just for flexing a different muscle and enjoying the process.
Ultimately, I kept coming back to the image of the willow, the same one I researched in college. I wrote a few different versions of poems about willows, but the one I’m sharing today is about a willow tree we saw last summer.
We’d gone for lunch at a place called the Old Saxon Mill, which is a pub on the Avon River, and was a working watermill well into the 1900s. It’s cool to know that Shakespeare once lived in this area, and could have well stumbled across a version of this same mill, which has been around for 800 years. I learned that willows only live for about half a century, maximum, but I like imagining that the same tree was present in his day.
My poem
Willow
Boughs low over the Avon, the willow lends herself to the boys throwing themselves into the river. Ropes on her branches, initials carved into her trunk. She might bleed, yes, and she might remember the monks who lived in the abbey across the bank, now fallen in from a fire. She can count all the events she’s survived, and she can tell of other men who once passed beneath her leaves. Reciting Shakespeare, yes, or Bible passages, or muttering curses against their enemies. She’s held so many prayers and the bodies of so many boys just as they’re about to launch themselves into whatever comes next: a role, a deed, or pure glittering joy in the rushing water.
Your turn
What does Shakespeare mean to you? Did you write a sonnet this week, or lines about the Bard? Share some lines below!
I thought your poem was great Jenna. I could really relate to it, as where I live here there are such old trees by the rivers. I was always not as brave as the others when I was a boy though - as far as using rope swings.
I do like it when poets explain the process by which they come to write a poem. I do it a bit - especially in my earlier Substack post.
As far as Shakespeare goes you reminded me of a time when a friend sent me Sonnet 14. It starts
“Not from the stars do I my judgement pluck;
And yet methinks I have Astronomy,”
I actually wrote a response to that poem. My poem is called Astronomy makes Perfect Sense.