Hello, everyone.
P.S. (Pat) Wilson is obscure. Featured on the NZETC (New Zealand Electronic Text Collection), his work seems to come from between 1945 and 1949 at Victoria University, but I can find little else.
Afaa Michael Weaver was born in 1951 in Baltimore, Maryland. The Nigerian Ibo name "Afaa", means "oracle". In 2001, he began teaching at National Taiwan University, and he also has a Chinese name.
A theme from the first text is divinity and spirituality. On the other hand, we can see emptiness and vanishing. You could address one of these sets of themes or both.
The second text is about youth and love, but also about loss and memory. Again, address one of these sets of themes or both.
The structure of the first text is in three paragraphs that gradually get longer. It also has some unusual punctuation. You could experiment with your line length, your stanza/paragraph length, or you could include some odd punctuation.
The structure of the second text is in couplets - sets of two lines. It also makes use of the names of places to strong effect. The first poem mentions a place too. You could write in couplets. You could also mention place names.
Six words to attempt to incorporate into your writing from Wilson: efficient, flat, dust, ruins, moment, home.
Six words from Weaver: together, challenge, faults, space, noise, cities.
If you have a copy of The Exercise Book (Manhire, Duncum, Price & Wilkins), turn to "#152: Radical Revision - a memory report" for an additional challenge.
That's all. I hope you are inspired to write today.
Waste Labour
by Pat Wilson
That efficient man Swedenborg
Was everlastingly preoccupied
With saying there was only one
God, not three. The thought
Of more than one filled him with rage.
I remember a day in Wales
When the whole atmosphere was filled
With god-like forces, stirring the flat
Of the stagnant lake, stirring the dust,
The ancient willow-bole, and a leaf
From its ancient, waving branches.
And when I left the high-placed ruins,
The high-placed home of gods, a wind
Arose in the black sky and followed
Me down; and blew for a moment high
And uncertain over the house, before
It died and vanished utterly, ?—the wind
That follows you home, the ghost wind.
Waste
by Afaa Michael Weaver
Everything that was young went quickly,
the way his eyes met mine as soon as we
woke together in a room outside Nanjing,
feeling as if all the things that were falling
would fall and make their thunder, leave
us with the challenge of being happy,
all the things that felt given when gifts
were not just surprises, but what we
knew, what we hoped to take with us
to heaven, unbound by faults and sins,
not deceived the way we were when
the end came to what we knew of China,
landing me here. I am a wish in the skies
spun out from celestial space to be poor,
to be covered with black skin, a felt
quilt of a map with only one way to China —
through pain as big as hogs squealing
at killing time on black farms in Alabama —
the noise of death, the shrill needle
that turns clouds over to rip the air
above the cities where people are young
and all that is given is never taken away.