Zelda's Inferno exercise: poem for a mobile

Posted on: Sun, 06/01/2008 - 21:43 By: Tom Swiss

Today's exercise was to write a poem suitable for use on a mobile: a list poem, with lines that can be read in any order, on the theme of motion or movement. I scrambled the order of the lines; the numbers give the original order, starting (in good C hacker fashion) with 0.

1 a child waving out the back window of a schoolbus
0 no electron
     remains the same
       from moment to moment
3 trees pre-thunderstorm
    lifting skirts to show
       silver underside of leaves
9 one red cell
    racing around my bloodsteam
       oxygen bellhop
6 at the peak of her leap
    the dancer is motionless
7 the belly moves out and in with each breath
2 sunlight caroming off ripples in the harbor
5 the slow growth of an oak
    the spurting growth of bamboo
8 the slow wobble
    of the earth on its axis
       changing the North Star in 10,000 years
4 teeming surging rush-hour subway crowd