May Third Sunday Write, or, Late Again. . . .

Well yes, it’s Bloomington Writer’s Guild’s “3rd Sunday Write” time again (see May 15, et al.), and as it has been in the recent past, I’m late with it again (e.g., that “May 15” above was for April). In fact, I’m even another day late putting it up on the blog, since it went on the 3rd Sunday Facebook page Thursday. So everything runs late, mea culpa, but an advantage of this one quasi-virtual event, is that one can be late with no harm done. That one can approach the prompt at leisure, then finish it up as time provides.

In fact, this one was drafted at the bus station that afternoon, scrawled on a newspaper I had with me, groceries on the bench beside me. I’d noted the prompts at the library before: one on the statement “I am landlocked”; a second, “The Blood Moon was clouded over,” ostensibly relating to a recent lunar eclipse missed because of poor weather; the third to comment on an attached poem; and the fourth on a photograph of a river in wooded surroundings (calming and peaceful). As I sometimes do, I chose to give one a kind of sidewise twist — in this case Number 2 — but, instead of a prose essay, to write it out as a poem. Thus:

THE BLOOD MOON WAS CLOUDED OVER

The Blood Moon was clouded,
it said it was on strike,
it still served the vampire community, of course —
that was why it was originally hired —
but in other respects its workload had increased
but with no boost in pay.
It wasn’t the werewolves it complained about,
that was seasonal work,
but instead the increased press of violent crime
among ordinary humans —
a clandestine knifing at times was okay,
that was to be expected,
people got on people’s nerves every night
the same as the monsters whose job it was to murder,
but mass killings with guns — there was no excuse for that!
Even the vampires and werewolves agreed.

(So okay, I didn’t say a good poem.)