A Tropical Recipe (2022 NaPoWriMo #06)

With a little digging I found another series of poetry prompts being provided by NaPoWriMo – 30 Poems in 30 Days. I started in the middle so these will be coming out of order as I work to catch-up.

Prompt 06

Write a poem where the first word of each line reads out the line of another poem/saying/quote.

NaPoWriMo.net

This seems to me to be asking for a variation on the Golden Shovel where instead of using the words from the line of the source poem/saying/quote as the final word in each line, you use it as the first.

In keeping with my earlier experiment for the Glosa form, I’m going to use the same source poem that I’ve previously used to write a Golden Shovel (and Glosa) — the poem by Claude McKay titled “Tropics in New York”.

Here is the quatrain from the poem that I’ve been pulling from:

“Bananas ripe and green, and ginger-root,

Cocoa in pods and alligator pears,

And tangerines and mangoes and grape fruit,

Fit for the highest prize at parish fairs,”

from Claude McKay’s “Tropics in New York”

My golden shovel pulled from the line “Cocoa in pods and alligator pears”. My Glosa used the entire quatrain. You can find them both here if you want to check them out.

Ok, let’s get this experiment going!

A Tropical Recipe

Inspired by Claude McKay’s “Tropics in New York”

Bananas crushed and mixed into the wet dough;
Ripe, almost too ripe, their sweetness wafts
And teases my nose;
Green pistachios, roughly chopped, go in too;
Ginger-root, a bit odd, I replace with vanilla and
Cocoa bean shavings,
In the mix they go, then all poured into
Pods for a dry sauna treatment at 162 degrees
And I watch as it basks in the heat like an
Alligator in the sun, then off to prepare the garnish of
Pears
And
Tangerines
And
Mangos
And
Grape
Fruit diced into a medley of colors — perfectly
Fit
For
The tropically moist delightful
Prize that once done won’t last long at
The
Parish
Fair.

Neat! Now I’ve written “From Tropics in New York” three ways. All quite different despite the shared DNA. I guess this goes to show the power of nurture over nature.

Be well,

Monty

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