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.

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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.

Simmering Mindfulness

by Justine C. Tajonera

My mind is discordant
with noise,
gossip and advice,
music and opinion,
kindness and rebuke
all simmering
in one pot
of synapses.

I lean into a skillet
and remember the path
to this dish:
the chopping of the
onions as the morning
light streamed through
the curtains,
the chicken bones, flesh
and skin
boiling and filling
the room with
the smell of
broth.

There was silence
in the mindfulness of
cooking,
just as there is silence
in the mindfulness
of prayer.

There is nothing
that cannot be
a meditation
when you empty
your pot of
your noise

and fill it with
being,
purpose
and love.

(Feb. 9, 2010)
Image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/betsymartian/371100987/in/set-72057594055269648/