From NaPoWriMo.net: “here’s our prompt for the day (optional, as always). Find a shortish poem that you like, and rewrite each line, replacing each word (or as many words as you can) with words that mean the opposite. For example, you might turn “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” to “I won’t contrast you with a winter’s night.” Your first draft of this kind of “opposite” poem will likely need a little polishing, but this is a fun way to respond to a poem you like, while also learning how that poem’s rhetorical strategies really work. (It’s sort of like taking a radio apart and putting it back together, but for poetry).”
My opposite poem in contrast to my favorite poem by Pablo Neruda
First, Pablo Neruda:
When I die, I want your hands on my eyes.
I want the light and wheat of your beloved hands to pass their freshness over me once more.
I want to feel the softness that changed my destiny.
I want you to live while I wait for you, asleep.
I want your ears still to hear the wind, I want you to sniff the sea’s aroma that we loved together,
to continue to walk on the sand we walk on.
I want what I love to continue to live,
and you whom I love and sang above everything else.
to continue to flourish, full-flowered.
So that you can reach everything my love directs you to.
So that my shadow can travel along in your hair,
so that everything can learn the reason for my song.
Pablo Neruda
My first draft of the opposite poem practice…
While I live, open my eyes with the memory of you
With the darkness and cold of what is missing
Trapping me in stillness just one time
While I sit in what stays the same
Don’t follow me into death while still living
Being dead to the beauty around you
Don’t shut your senses to all life has to offer
Be still but do not disappear
Then die over and over again fully awake
I want you to transcend and transform
Through the experience of pain
In the moments of anguish, know joy will come
Do not be complacent and dismissive of all possibilities in this life
Be the light to carry on the memory of our love
Shine so brightly you blind those around you
All that remains is one
WhatsHerName Writes 