Frankenberry's Attic

My pal David has a weekly writing prompt he offers up at his blog, The Skeptic’s Kaddish, called The W3: Wea’ve Written Weekly where there is a new Poem of the Week chosen by the writer of the previous week’s Poem of the Week, and the current Poem of the Week’s author chooses the guidelines of the weekly prompt challenge.

I haven’t joined this prompt challenge before but this one, from Josie Holford, offered one, her wonderful poem “Hope” and two, a challenge to “borrow the opening line of any poem, famous or obscure, and use it as the starting point for a poem of your own”.

She also offered up some opening line possibilities one of which had me immediately thinking of a follow up line so I thought I would just go with it.

The opening line: “At lunchtime I bought a huge orange—” from Wendy Cope, The Orange

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(Pixabay – alexas_fotos-sunset-2180346_1920)

Behold Orange

At lunchtime I bought a huge orange and held it

straight overhead

offering it squinting

to the sun

like a migrant’s sweat and pride from atop his ladder

and compared

until I was holding the sun at the end of my fingers

having plucked it

now

from the sky

and we were made huge

finally

now

holding the sun as a God

would

to build myths of for children

and paintings and song