Get ready for this weekend's creativity challenge.
I dare you to write a poem using a 149-word exactly, not including the title. Use the following words: pottery, vindictive, backfill, sheriff.
We’ll showcase the top challenge responses in our newsletter. And the best part, you, our readers, decide who wins. The entries with the highest number of likes will be declared the winners. You’ll have until Sunday or Monday midnight to post your response. Once we lock the thread, we’ll reveal the writing champions and their entries! Are you up to the challenge?
Just as Pottery is Sculpted
Just as pottery is sculpted
By a potter’s skill, works, arts—
A vindictive word then be crafted
From one’s bosom, chest, hearts—
As the scenery is molded—
That is to say— from one’s abode—
From the backfill— that once surrounded
A persons works— they have sorrowed
Just as a Sheriff is to county
And the sky is to earth—
The reign of necessity—
Marks innovations birth—
The days— and works deployed
Under the reign— of necessity
Whether embraced— or taught to avoid—
Under this here prophecy:
“The calendar has its course;
That is to say it’s ways—
Each year, month, week— but a source
That is counted into days—
Carefully consider the path of the moon
Watching the pattern of the sea—
The sculpture of this here tune—
Shall guide— you precisely—
If you read each stanza from beginning to end
You will count 149 words— that do portend.”
GHOSTS
I am trying, and failing to backfill the parts of my life that you stole from me.
In Japan, they fill the cracks in pottery with gold,
but the only thing I can find to fill the cracks in my heart
is vindictive rage.
I am looking everywhere for those weak spots
that once allowed me to trust, to love, to forgive.
Those pieces of myself that I pushed down so deeply,
there is only silence and emptiness left behind.
I wonder what it would be like, to proudly proclaim:
“There’s a new sheriff in town,”
and run the ghosts of my past out of their hiding places
in the nooks and crannies of my mind.
I imagine it would feel like freedom,
but what does that mean for a person
who is used to living with those ghosts?
It gets lonely around here
without those ghosts to talk to,
to take up that empty space in my head.
But maybe, just maybe, I’m ready to be left alone.
BROKEN SYLLABIC PANTOUM
Who knew you were so vindictive? Now you’ve gone
and smashed up my grandmother’s best pottery.
Do you really think I won’t call the sheriff?
Just watch me. You’ll have your whole life to backfill.
You just had to go and trash her pottery.
How could you not know I’m polyamorous?
Don’t believe me? Just watch. Then you can backfill
your heart with a whole swamp of crocodile tears.
What’s it to you if I’m polyamorous?
You’re the last one who should tell me what to do,
you with your cavernous heart and salty tears
and stories of how everyone’s done you wrong.
You’re the last person to tell me what to do.
Do you really think I won’t call the sheriff?
Go on. Tell your tale of how I done you wrong,
you vindictive loser. You’re better off gone.
"Sheriff, I wish to report a vindictive
pottery crime . . . "
IN TOMBSTONE
Let the historians of today’s time—
if anyone really wants to be a historian of our time—
Let them know that the zeitgeist of the age is in Tombstone.
Not the vindictive Sheriff in the OK Corral shootout in eighteen eighty-one, no,
I’m talking about the tourists of Tombstone in twenty twenty-one.
Just take one photograph of those t-shirt clad vacationers!
See how they tread all over the lumpy, backfill graves,
One has a can of diet coke in his hand while he reads the stone:
‘Here lies Lester Moore—four slugs from an A44—no less—no more.’
With his phone he takes a picture of himself,
Grinning astride the corpse of Lester Moore.
And to think somewhere in Greece,
There are ropes and tapes and securities all to protect
A single shard of ancient painted pottery:
Painted on it not a coke can tourist, but a Hercules.
https://apward.substack.com/p/in-tombstone
Hi Andrew. Would you mind also pasting it here in the thread so others can read, and vote for it? Thanks :)
Sorry! Done.
One word after another
Words pile up, one after another
they try to connect, but like broken pottery
it’s not easy piecing them together
This word goes behind that one and
this one in front of the one before it
one after another, the words come together
The word sheriff shuffles them into place
moving the verb to connect better
with the noun, and backfill another adverb
to add additional punch to the puzzle
drawing the battle lines one word at a time
creating a picture puzzle one word after another
Each word, one after another,
creating a word world taking you away
off into your own strange imagination
A fantasy, a mystery, a romantic dream
or a horrifying, vindictive nightmare
one word after another, the puzzle comes to life
The word sheriff, vindictive at times,
brings the broken pottery pieces together
backfilling the final puzzle pieces into place
one word after another
The Pottery Mystery
The room was half-filled with earthen vessels,
The sheriff wondered who had made them,
It was evident that it was made by
someone skilled in the art of pottery,
As he and his partner stood wondering,
Someone emerged from a dark corner of the room,
An old lady with a stern look,
A sage had seen it in a book,
He said she had crafted the vessels with a vindictive heart,
They were made from the backfill of her son's grave,
The more she made them,
The more her son’s ghost was on a rampage,
The town was torn apart,
The sheriff interrogated her,
At first, she said nothing,
Only tears streamed down her eyes,
His partner said a word in her dialect,
That word broke the ice,
She told them it was a price,
That until her son’s death be avenged,
Tranquillity will be a shadow in summer.
The Dusty Buildings
The dusty buildings long for sweet repose
As a castigated child often does
When vindictive mothers strictly impose
The lash of their tongue on their rules of love
Long ago these buildings were made to last
Designed and built with care and attention
But their architects have long since then passed
Their tenets fled with their apprehensions
But, Oh! such happy days these buildings held
And the walls still cherish mem'ries of old
The pottery-boy, when first he beheld
The joy of perfecting that mere first mould
Or the choir girl when she mastered her tune
The mother's sigh as she nursed her first born
The young man prompting his lover to swoon
The Sheriff shining the star he'll adorn
But now the flats are lonely and vacant
And the plots soon the fodder of backfill
All our his'try swept under the blanket
With remembrance of our vigorous will
Handle With Care
The Sages tell of two doves that fly;
Their rainbow of love doth span the sky.
The pottery shards in the backfill tell their story;
When keeping up appearances was mandatory
Lives shattered to smithereens, pique, and a fence…
The pressure on the lovers was incredibly intense.
The Scribe who dared to love the daughter;
The vindictive father who sought to thwart her.
Sending his Sheriff, today’s C.E.O;
To search and to capture, to search high and low;
A posse to chase them o’er hill and vale.
Never imagining that true love would prevail.
The daughter, though captive, her hopes never ceased;
She eloped with her lover on the day of the feast.
The dastardly father, killed the man and tore them apart
She died minutes later, of a broken heart.
The gods to protect them and their innocent loves
Made them doves flying free in the skies above.