This week’s collaborative read write prompt is brought to you by Read Write Poem participant Holly, from Lost Kite. Thank you, Holly, for the prompt! If anyone else has prompt ideas, we’d love for you to share them. Simply email us at prompt (at) readwritepoem (dot) org.
I have been teaching the book Steppenwolf , by Herman Hesse, to my freshman students at Gainesville State College. This is a book that has influenced my thinking in many ways, and I never get tired of reading it. In the book, the main character, Harry, has a dualistic nature (man and wolf). He struggles with who he really is (or even wants to be), as though he has to be just one thing or another. Is he bourgeois? Is he an intellectual? Is he animalistic? We all have this struggle on some level-to figure stuff out, to “find ourselves.”
Another character, Hermine (who becomes Herman at one point in the book), is comfortable with the many sides of herself — intellectual, playful, shallow, deep, feminine, masculine, mother and daughter. She doesn’t necessarily think these parts of us have to conflict.
Hermine proposes that it is human for us to all have layers, like an onion — not just devil and angel, or masculine and feminine, or human and animal — but many, many souls inside of us. When we are peeled (or choose to peel ourselves), we reveal a new layer. We keep revealing layers throughout our lives.
Let’s get comfortable with our many layers by imagining ourselves as onions! (I wanna be a Vidalia myself. I’d better put on my contacts. I can’t peel an onion with bare eyes … ooo, I’ll cry.) Whatever type of onion you are, you have layers. Are you a student, parent, lover, child, poet, intellectual, activist? Are you shy, outgoing, self-conscious, alert, oblivious? Heroic, fearful, uncertain, confused?
Do you have other layers that define you? Of course you do. We could never begin to list them all.
Here’s how we’re going to do it, and how we’re going to make it collaborative:
- We each write a stanza (or stanzas if you want to write from more than one layer) the represents a layer of yourself. Don’t get too hung up on making something “perfect.” We are all just supplying raw material here.
- We leave those stanzas in the comments of this post. Posting will close at midnight Sunday (Central Standard Time).
- We are all invited to work with any or all of the stanzas left in the comments and do whatever we want with them in terms of revision. The sky’s the limit in terms of how we recast the pieces to create something new. Use all. Use some. Break stanzas apart and reconnect them with other stanzas. Change the order. Augment. Reduce. However you want to approach it is up to you.
- We all come back for the Get Your Poem On post Thursday and link to the revised work. Then the merriment ensues as we see how other people have handled and shaped the raw material.
Sound good? Good. Let’s all peel away.
Note: In case it’s not super clear, the topic we are writing about is not onions. The onion is the metaphor for how we are talking about the layers of self and writing from those layers. We are writing about ourselves.
A reflection in the mirror was it you or me
I’d definitely be a colossal Vidalia Onion!
W. Brannen
Director
Vidalia Onion Committee
VidaliaOnion.org
Block the fist, ease egos,
broker detente. Bandage
wounds. Tend the bruise,
the insult, the scab. Glue
and mop. Grab at time like
dropped money.
I move through the world
rough as a rope, taught as all
the promises I’ve ever made.
I lean into you, whisper.
You step out from behind
your executive desk and tell me
I smell like oatmeal and your mother.
(And thank you, Holly, for this great prompt!)
the little girl likes chocolate ice cream
most of all. her favorite possession
is a yellow bike with a banana seat, plastic
basket and streamers gleaming
from the handlebars. she reads
old men’s minds and chapter books
by judy blume.
When she stopped eating meat
she noticed the shoes, the belts,
the bags made of leather,
felt a shiver when she eyed
the skin stretched
over the couch, the ottoman.
The patrolman’s beam blinds the stars,
in her eyes his own reflection.
He stands above the mirror
looks down into her pupils.
One of us can learn
a thing or two tonight
but someone must release the light.
unseen
the gossamer curtain’s
fall
that divides
the soul’s duality
divergent commonality
a polarized reality
through which
truth stumbles blind
He sits in a corner
like a wombat and watches the flow
of people, the shuffle of feet
with their different sounds
according to the shoe
and to the shape of the person’s face,
to how the line of their lip
curves into the morning
ribbons of her thoughts
tie her down. sometimes
with meticulous care
others, barely so
strainer of her mind
filters out what ails her
survivor that she is now
but with austerity takes out
the inherent spirit of hers
We meet for early lunch. Amidst
The line of white cheese sandwiches
I interrupt with a warm bowl
Perfuming of foreign lands.
Back in my office I leave the door
Open for you to peak
Over my shoulder, onto
My multicolored screen.
Beneath the
Warm smiles
And pleasant gestures
The radar eyes
Scans the forgotten creases
Ruffled hair and
Smirks at clandestine getaways
One Sunday morning
kids sneak onto the construction site
nothing but a cage of studs & trusses
with a floor they play upon for hours
running from room to imaginary room
the whole world close enough to touch.
I go slow because I can,
practicing non-attachment:
pieces of me stick to whoever gets too close
& must be surgically removed.
Trees are my main weakness.
You may have seen me high in an elm,
sihouetted against the night sky
like the moon’s bucktoothed twin.
I find a mate once a year
on the coldest night in January,
& our duet makes even the coyotes
cower in their dens.
onions have layers
ogres have layers
I have layers
I hope that I am not so
hideous in your sight
that you run from unseen green
skin, horns, and strange trumpet ears
I also hope that I don’t
make you cry
as you peel me away
so peel back all of the layers
thin by thin
skin by skin
and there’s the quivering soul
at the core
holding out a single rose
hoping you’ll take it from my fingers
if she carries enough chips
eventually they will become
too heavy to hold or swallow or
chew or lug in a massive bag
she will have to start letting them
fall away
Skullfinger ribrattles banjo my nightjar lids,
those fictions, those nictitating membranes
stretched between the Pleiades. (Say what?)
Look, there’s little else you can do with such
bonewhite lies as I am heir to. (Soup?
Scrimshaw?) I mean, sure, a skeleton’s O.K.
for morality plays. But the inescable
optimism implicit in my barebones grin–
that’s not me. I am what I ham what I eat.
(Sorry for the multiple responses, but I’m working on something for the Day of the Dead and thought it would be fun to share the stanzas here, too. Great prompt!)
[...] partial response to a ReadWritePoem prompt, “peel the onion.” It’s another experiment in open-content collaboration, which I [...]