Condensing a poem…

Valentine

No rose – my gift tells
Love’s power, passion and pain -
A truthful onion.

Challenged by readwritepoem, I have tried to condense a poem that I love (Carol Ann Duffy’s valentine) into that most compact format, the haiku. A challenging exercise, which loses a lot of the qualities of the original in the process, but it did make me focus on that poem in a new way.

Onion heart, originally uploaded by Big.Col.

Cactus…

“Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it’s the answer to everything. To ”Why am I here?” To uselessness. It’s the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it’s a cactus.” Enid Bagnold