NaPoWriMo Day 9: "Things that are Worthy in Being Long without Love"

This was an easy mashup!

Today's NaPoWriMo prompt: to write a list of "things" following the example of Sei Shonagon's The Pillow Book.

Today's PAD Challenge prompt: to write a love poem, or an anti-love poem.

This is the roughest of drafts as I am fitting it in between a day of teaching and going to my colleague's book release reading. But I had not read Sei Shonagon before and am fascinated -- I think I will be experimenting more with her list form. I have already written a list poem that has had a lot of positive response and was in my MFA application manuscript, "The Empties."

On a side note, Shonagon wrote in the 990s and I am entranced to find out that in over a thousand years not much has changed with regard to a certain form of male behavior. In the section on "Hateful Things":  "A man who has nothing in particular to recommend him discusses all sorts of subjects at random as though he knew everything."

Things that are Worthy in Being Long without Love

After Sei Shonagon

The bed is creased on one side, the other a cool, high plain.

A cat snores when it sleeps so its face presses against the blanket.

Each day you consider and lift from the cupboard the one bowl whose curve you most
long to feel in your hand.

But food eaten from the container is most delicious.

You do not watch any loved one grow closer to death, and you, you will live forever,
preserved in such solitude.

You need not pretend to care for your loved one’s friends and relations, and their
tiresome stories in which you do not appear.

At night, the lamp glows in the corner; in the daytime, the sunlight angles on the floor.

No one will wake you at night, sick and querulous. No one will blame you for how you
didn’t listen and your eye went to your phone. No one will say nothing at all and still you
find you have left yourself to become more or what they are.

To choose what you will do each day reminds you of the infinity and terror of freedom.

Love itself remains perfection, everything you always dreamed of.

You listen to yourself explain why you are without love. You come to hear how these
explanations are merely stories. You come to understand that love is only a story too.
You realize you, too, can be a writer.

You imagine, as the dharma urges, that you might relinquish attachment.

You know that you are made of fire.

The moon looks at you. You look at the moon. 

(I came up with the line about the moon before I came upon this perfect image of Sei Shonagon!)

--Draft by Anne Myles. Please do not quote/copy/cite without permission.