The small notebook languished
at the bottom of a dark drawer
its pages filled with
lists of vegetables, partial poems
Ingredients lists for salads and stews
long since cooked and eaten
but not necessarily forgotten
Poem bits inspired late at night
by verses careening through
the writer’s mind in wakefulness
Ideas for the next great
inspirational Christian bestseller
scribbled in haste at a stoplight
Prayers for loved ones
some long gone
others still in need of those
languishing prayers
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The Tuesday Poetics prompt at dVerse Poets Pub today calls for writing a poem that includes one line from the poem Burning the Old Year by Naomi Shihab Nye. I was going to wait until tomorrow to write this so it could be my Lenten poem for tomorrow, but after reading Nye’s poem I couldn’t get this poem out of my head. I chose the line “lists of vegetables, partial poems.” So here it is, an extra for today.