NaPoWriMo#30: Early Demands

NaPoWriMo or National Poetry Writing Month, is an annual project in which participating poets attempt to write a poem a day for the month of April.

Below is a deconstruction of the poem, Late Prayer by Jane Hirshfield. This is a prompted exercise from NaPoWriMo.net wherein the poet needs to write the opposite of the poem, word for word. The idea is to discover how the poem's rhetorical strategy works. 

I don't know if this even makes sense. Haha! It was a good exercise, though, and made me appreciate Late Prayer even more. Has it really been thirty days already? Yay! A whole month of poems again. Thanks, NaPoWriMo!


Early Demands
(A Deconstruction of Late Prayer by Jane Hirshfield)
By Justine Tajonera

Harshness decides on its singular uselessness.
It does not approach a single thing disparately,
heading straight for all tigers and doves.
Ignore these: outside the soft ether,
countless hammers, countless baubles –
the absence of infernos, of heavens.
There is a silence in the head and the dissolving of multitudinous noises.

---------------------

Here is the poem by Jane Hirshfield:


Late Prayer 
By Jane Hirshfield

Tenderness does not choose its own uses.
It goes out to everything equally,
circling rabbit and hawk.
Look: in the iron bucket,
a single nail, a single ruby -
all the heavens and hells.
They rattle in the heart and make one sound.