So the 30daysofcreativity site entered my radar earlier this week, and I succumbed accordingly. Everything will be posted over at my Tumblr, here. This piece is kind of a crossover so I thought I’d post it here as well.

It’s a wordle prompt this week! I genuinely thought I wasn’t going to make it but I scraped in at the last second. I didn’t use all the words. If I had, it would have been a “killer” poem entitled: Stab! Stab! Stab! Instead, it’s a poem about a friend who is moving out of home. She had a dream where her boat was sinking, but she didn’t want to be in the water because she was scared of the whales. Once I stopped laughing at her whale phobia, I realised it fit nicely with her current situation.

We were asked to change our point of view for this week’s Big Tent Poetry prompt. To do this, we were to choose a portrait, and write about the subject from the point of view of the photographer. I chose this image of a concentrating man for the basis of my poem.

The Big Tent Poetry prompt this week was about fruit, or food. A few years ago I planted a passionfruit vine in a pot on my balcony. It grew nicely, and every year it flowers happily but never produces fruit. Not enough bees I guess!

It’s sad to watch as the beautiful blossoms wither up and drop to the ground.

This week’s Big Tent Poetry prompt was to use alliteration to write a list of words, then choose one as the basis of your poem. I chose “F” words, because my home town of Brisbane was about to Flood, and when I saw footage of what happened just west of us in Toowoomba, I said another choice F word :)

The poem itself then grew around the “sssshhhh” sound I could hear as the rain started.

I wrote another poem on the floods for the POW prompt, which you can read here, you can view my photos of damage to my local area before and after the peak here and most importantly, donate to the Premier’s Disaster Relief Fund here. I live on a hill so we were okay, but people at the bottom of the hill weren’t so lucky.

Many of my favourite local haunts will emerge badly flood damaged once the water goes down and the carnage spreads across something like 75% of our state. Many people have water up to their gutters, some don’t even have houses any more. So pretty please, donate some money to the Premier’s Disaster Relief Appeal. I have taken some photos of the impact of our local area, but if you need more convincing, there are plenty of other shots from around the state circulating on the net.

And so, the poem:

On the plus side, I feel refreshed and renewed and ready for new prompts from Big Tent Poetry. This one is about feet.

Photography by Peter Johns.

This month has been crazy, wonderful, inspiring and exhausting and I look forward to recovering for a while with my head in a book, then coming back some time in May to check out all the new prompt sites. Thanks to Read Write Poem for being so awesome, you’ll be sorely missed and dearly remembered. Thanks to everyone who provided the prompts – they were all great, no matter how much I swore at them at the time! Also, thank you so much to everyone who commented on my poems, it’s been really wonderful to have you around :)