Reverse
Here’s our prompt for the day (optional, as always). Find a shortish poem that you like, and rewrite each line, replacing each word (or as many words as you can) with words that mean the opposite. For example, you might turn “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” to “I won’t contrast you with a winter’s night.” Your first draft of this kind of “opposite” poem will likely need a little polishing, but this is a fun way to respond to a poem you like, while also learning how that poem’s rhetorical strategies really work. (It’s sort of like taking a radio apart and putting it back together, but for poetry).
Here is the poem that I chose for the prompt, /The Diviner/ by Seamus Heaney,
Cut from the green hedge a forked hazel stick
That he held tight by the arms of the V:
Circling the terrain, hunting the pluck
Of water, nervous, but professionally
Unfussed. The pluck came sharp as a sting.
The rod jerked down with precise convulsions,
Spring water suddenly broadcasting
Through a green aerial its secret stations.
The bystanders would ask to have a try.
He handed them the rod without a word.
It lay dead in their grasp till, nonchalantly,
He gripped expectant wrists. The hazel stirred
And here is my attempt to ‘invert’ it:
Stitched to the blue feather a straight birch leaf
That she dropped lightly by his legs:
Wandering aimlessly, avoiding his gaze
Of fire, bold, but casually
hesitant. The gaze dropped blunt as a blow.
The head tilted sideward with inaccurate smoothness,
Winter fire slowly withdrawing
Into its black burrow which was not hidden.
The family wouldn't tell her to stop.
She took the feather from them with a scream.
It came to life in her palm till, attentively
She released hesitant fingers. The feather stilled.