Doing the month long NaPoWriMo poetry prompts with my poet friend Marty McGovern. If you’re a poet and aren’t doin’ it, try it. It’s fun and you never know what you are going to end up with.

Here’s my stab for Day Five, using Stanley Kunitz’s poem, End of Summer, for my prompt, using the same first letters in each line (okay, I cheated in the last line) and following loosely the line length. (okay, I cheated there too!) (oh, and I didn’t rhyme . . . whoops!)

The Sandhill Cranes of San Luis Valley

to Lucy

A half-thermal of air
and a left off Highway 160
arrested the cold of glacial farm fields
we passed, shaken by a year of such frost

we will not forget. We stand in a rutted drive
amid winter refuse and ditches, unready to be
awoke, to go glittering beneath the half-fences,
the dark of our cameras we uncap

blown with such light we had forgot.
A crane flies out of a wind block of marsh,
then wave after wave of rose-tipped cranes plow
the winter sky, the cold we’ve owned.

Already what we prayed for
craters us into unimaginable spring: a volcano’s
old mouth, we dared to enter, enflamed
by cranes, thousands in old potato fields, and leaping.