Understand (a poem for Big Tent Poetry)
March 23, 2011
A wordle word-cloud featuring words I've recently used on this blog. See it full-sized here.
UNDERSTAND
If you want to understand
the God of the Torah,
of the Exodus, if you want
to experience that first
redemption along with
the children of Israel
you need to learn
how to breathe new air
how to receive
how to cup your hands around
the name of the person
you are still becoming
together with your family
open your home, inner-city
or country, to all
who hunger, to the harbinger
of the future who sips
every Pesach from his cup
your children can teach you
to experience revelation
they remember the wonders
our story is old
but today is new
come, find the miracles
This week's prompt at Big Tent Poetry invites us to use their various poetry tools to spark a poem which will take us somewhere new. I decided to try creating a wordle word cloud; I went to wordle.net and gave it the URL of this blog, and from this blog it drew the words I've used most often of late. (You can see the word cloud it created at the top of this post.)
The word cloud fed my own words back to me in a new way. Stripped of their context, they gleamed like new jewels. It was fun to take these words (which are, after all, the words on which I've lately leaned the most) and reorganize them into something new.
I did something like this back in 2005, when I used an online blog profiling service to tell me which ten words I used most often and then crafted a sestina using six words Blogpulse chose for me. Intriguingly, the two poems generated out of repeated words on this blog don't share many repeated words, though I think they're thematically pretty similar.
Here's a link to the Come One, Come All post so you can see what others did wth this prompt.