1. Read the poem 

  2. Do your own reflection on it, noting what it inspires in you

  3. Feel free to use your own reflection as your prompt or…

  4. Use the selection of prompts below the poem

  5. Pick one that inspires you and write (feel free to use only one or write several poems using different prompts) or…

  6. Don’t use any of the provided prompts and follow your inspiration from wherever it comes

Apple Blossoms

One evening in winter 
when nothing has been enough, 
when the days are too short, 

the nights too long 
and cheerless, the secret 
and docile buds of the apple 

blossoms begin in their quick 
ascent to light. Night 
after interminable night 

the sugars pucker and swell 
into green slips, green 
silks. And just as you find 

yourself at the end 
of winter’s long, cold 
rope, the blossoms open 

like pink thimbles 
and that black dollop 
of shine called 

bumblebee stumbles in.

Susan Kelly-DeWitt
This poem is included the anthology: How to Love the World
www.susankelly-dewitt.com

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Note: Next Read Around is:
April 16, 2021 at 4:00 PM PST

My Thoughts

Poems like this one from our own Sacramento poet, Susan Kelly-DeWitt, make me want to be a better poet. The poem makes we want to see the world with fresh eyes, to find some small detail, a budding leaf, and follow it through the seasons, or track the backlit optics on a spider’s mandala shifting with the sun’s arc across the sky. “Apple Blossoms” paints a perfect contrast between our interminable impatience and nature’s gentle unfolding; how we, in our dark nights, miss what is already beginning to blossom, what is already making a quick ascent to the light; how we so often have to come to the end of our rope before we open ourselves to revelation. And even then, we stumble in with the sheen of our blighted darkness for the nectar.

At least that is how I read the poem from my own anthropomorphic lens—as a kind of hopeful ode to faith in life’s thriving. It’s a great poem to keep by the bedside and pull out on those dark nights. It makes me want to be a better poet because it challenges me to let nature speak through me in it’s own way rather than imposing myself on it. Susan never says the things I extrapolated here. But, like a guiding angel, or a zen master, her the poem invited me to my own conclusion. Perhaps someday I shall be as deft and skillful as a poet. Until then, I will practice writing daily like a calligraphy artist with a long brush-tipped stick and a bucket of water composing poetry on the sidewalk, the first lines evaporating before the last lines are written.

Prompt Menu

  1. Use Susan’s opening line as a stem sentence and free write from there: One evening in winter…
    Or change the season or time reference. For example, one morning in spring…

  2. Write a poem from the experience of “when nothing is enough.”

  3. Write a poem or ode to the lengthening of daylight and how that changes the way you experience the day or what you do during the day.

  4. Go out in nature and find some small detail, patterns in the shapes of leaves, or the sound of water lapping against the banks of the river, and use that as the inspiration for poetry.

  5. Susan uses the metaphor of winter’s long, cold rope. What metaphor might serve for the end of other seasons? 

  6. Write about a time when you got to the end of your rope on some particular issue or challenge and what happened when you went beyond it.

  7. Imagine becoming something that blossoms, a flower, buds on a tree, and describe what that experience might be like from the inside out.

  8. As usual, right from anything else that inspires you in the poetry or from your life.