Today’s NaPoWriMo challenge is to “write a poem that begins with a line from a another poem … but then goes elsewhere with it.”
The challenge states that the line doesn’t need to be the first line of the poem you borrow from, but my line is. It’s the beginning of perhaps my favorite poem of all time:
I Sang by Carl Sandburg.
I Sang (A Borrowing Poem)
I sang to you and the moon
But only the moon remembers.
Cold, distant, repository of
Songs and dreams,
Of hope and yearning.
Cold and distant.
Why sing to the moon?
Why dream of it,
Hope for it,
When these precious hopes
And dreams and songs
Come to rest in a cold
And distant bosom?
The moon offers no warmth
To fertilize our hopes,
To nurture the growth
Of our dreams.
It keeps our yearnings
Too far out of our reach.
Perhaps the cold works
Merely to preserve—
A static rearguard action
Against entropy and loss.
Such a hopeless object.
It would be no better
To sing to the sun,
Yet more distant,
A furnace to incinerate
What we send it.
Sing, rather, to each other,
To the trees, and flowers,
and grass, and dirt,
And mountains, and rivers,
And oceans. To the
Animals and insects,
To the here and now.
Here is where we find
Food and warmth,
Companionship, and the
Meaningful interactions
Of mind to mind,
Body to body,
Soul to soul.
Here, now, each other—
Sing to these,
Yearn for these,
Dream of these.
I sang to you,
But not the moon,
And it remembers not at all.
John the Librarian 