I decided to use the Day 3 prompt from napowrimo.net and make my own parable, or something as close as I could get to my own parable.
Grandmother Hydra – A Parable
A grandmother & granddaughter
sit at a table searching in a book
of line drawings for the right picture
to color into a multifaceted rainbow.
Cookies warm and spread out in the oven.
Their fragrance escapes out the open
window where the chick-a-dee sings
in the cedar. I want there to be a lesson,
to turn it over like a coin. I want
memory to have two sides, heads or tails,
Look. See. The grandmother grows
so many heads and eyes and tails and
granddaughter is so afraid, she forgets
to speak and what isn’t used is lost.
It was never nine long nights strung on
the tree of life, it was never an eye plucked
for wisdom. It was the voice, the tongue,
to lose the chance to declare existence.
And grandmother plucked her throat
like a string, and that is the end of days.
There is no happily ever after, it’s just this
poem and the sound of a pen clawing
across the page which sounds the same
as a chick-a-dee scratching at the bark
of a cedar branch, sounds the same as
the word dissolve as a grandmother
moans into her metamorphosis,
sounds the same as memory recalled.
Thank you Kathy! And thank you for all the great comments on this poem yesterday! :)
What a gorgeously sad memory of longing. The use of an image of a hydra - a monster to speak of a grandmother - so surprising and powerful. I love this poem.