Daily Prompt Love <3 Head Above Water
9 September 2019
Make art about staying afloat.
Image by Jasmin Sessler from Pixabay
Posts tagged ‘survivor’
Monday Must Read! Blood Dazzler by Patricia Smith
In minute-by-minute detail, Patricia Smith tracks Hurricane Katrina as it transforms into a full-blown mistress of destruction. From August 23, 2005, the day Tropical Depression Twelve developed, through August 28 when it became a Category Five storm with its “scarlet glare fixed on the trembling crescent,” to the heartbreaking aftermath, these poems evoke the horror that unfolded in New Orleans as America watched it on television.
Assuming the voices of flailing politicians, the dying, their survivors, and the voice of the hurricane itself, Smith follows the woefully inadequate relief effort and stands witness to families held captive on rooftops and in the Superdome. She gives voice to the thirty-four nursing home residents who drowned in St. Bernard Parish and recalls the day after their deaths when George W. Bush accompanied country singer Mark Willis on guitar:
The cowboy grins through the terrible din,
***
And in the Ninth, a choking woman wails
Look like this country done left us for dead.
An unforgettable reminder that poetry can still be “news that stays news,” Blood Dazzler is a necessary step toward national healing.
Patricia Smith is the author of four previous collections of poetry, including Teahouse of the Almighty, winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize. A record-setting, national poetry slam champion, she was featured in the film Slamnation, on the HBO series Def Poetry Jam, and is a frequent contributor to Harriet, the Poetry Foundation’s blog. Visit her website at http://www.wordwoman.ws.
Daily Prompt Love <3 That Fire
20 May 2019
Make art about walking through fire, about surviving the fire.
Daily Prompt Love <3 Diaspora In the Blood
13 January 2018
Thinking a lot about the ancestors, about how my DNA report reads like a mini United Nations, about the courage and desperation and desire they must have felt, possessed, to leave their homelands, from eleven different regions of the globe, leaving all they knew, for all kinds of reasons, some forced and others willing, escaping starvation, violence, but all without any idea of what lay before them.
Did they all know they would never go home again? What will it must have taken to survive. Do I carry that same strength of will? Do I honor what it took, what they went through. with my own life? A life I owe them?
Make art about who dances in your blood.
Daily Prompt Love <3 Persistence, Resilience
28 October 2017
Make art about the shapes of persistence, of resilience.
Daily Prompt Catch-Up! Survivors and Rain
Daily Prompt Catch-Up!
3/18/2016
Make art about survivors.
3/19/2016
Make art inspired by a rainy Saturday.
Daily Prompt: Trauma & Becoming
Daily Prompt
I am not who I was 5 years ago.
Make art about the Becoming after trauma.
#writingprompt #art #poetry #fiction #nonfiction #wordsmatter #trauma #ptsd
Mary Carroll-Hackett: Poetry and Prose 
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