Write a poem centered about or within your body.
Another great common denominator of humanity. We all have one. Artists of all kinds have used the body as inspiration for creativity, to explore pain, feelings, disease, and loss.
In “Flying Inside Your Own Body,” novelist and poet Margaret Atwood (author of Alias Grace and The Handmade’s Tail) depicts what happens to the body as it readies itself to take flight:
Your lungs fill & spread themselves,
wings of pink blood, and your bones
empty themselves and become hollow…
She ends in a mix of despair and anger, recognizing that this can only happen in dreams:
Waking, your heart is a shaken fist,
a fine dust clogs the air you breathe in;
the sun’s a hot copper weight pressing straight
down on the thick pink rind of your skull…
Atwood’s imagery is vital and startling: “wings of pink blood,” hollow bones, the sun as a “hot copper weight” on the “thick pink rind of your skull.” It’s not difficult to imagine a morning of migraine headaches and mundane burdens following a glorious night of light.
Poet Lucille Clifton offers stunning imagery in “poem to my uterus:”
you uterus
you have been patient
as a sock
while i have slippered into you
my dead and living children
now
they want to cut you out…
“Patient / as a sock” is startling in both its mundanity and surprise. Immediately, I imagine that sock I dropped in the small space between my dryer and the wall, and how it waited there for a week before I found and retrieved it. Clifton draws a parallel between that patient sock and her patient uterus. “Patient” itself alludes to the speaker’s impending experience as a medical patient having her uterus removed.
In “Anodyne,” Yusef Konumyakaa’s celebratory and poignant poem, the poet explores areas of his body and how they connect him to home and identity:
I love my crooked feet
shaped by vanity & work
shoes made to outlast
belief…
Note how he associates his feet with his vanity. Later, he writes:
I love my big hands.
I love it clear down to the soft
quick motor of each breath,
the liver’s ten kinds of desire
& the kidney’s lust for sugar.
This skin, this sac of dung
& joy, this spleen floating
like a compass needle inside
nighttime, always divining
West Africa’s dusty horizon…
Konumyakaa pairs each objective part with a conceptual piece of his identity: the liver is desire; the kidney is hunger; skin is joy; and the spleen is a compass that connects him to his African ancestry.
Write a poem that is centered within our around your body. What inside you calls to be seen? What part of you do you habitually ignore? What part scares you? How much space do you take up? How does your body change? What parts of you do you love? What does the whole of you add up to?
