Thank you, YesNo. Not enough horses in that race, but I'm easily flattered. :)
The next poem can actually take whatever form, meter, or lack of meter the poet likes, as long as it is an apostrophe. No, not the venerable item of punctuation, but a literary device in which one speaks to someone or something who isn't there or can't answer (Blake, Jesus, a flea on a lady's bonnet), an inanimate object or subject (night, your first car, the white cliffs of Dover), or even a personified abstraction (justice, death, foot odor). "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" is an apostrophe. So is this poem, addressed to a prehistoric cave painter, which I recently entered in another contest thread:
Spirit Cave
Only this I ask of you,
Trespasser in the black womb
Of our mother's night:
When you have frightened up
Those horses from their doom,
And written them into her fertile sides,
Then trace there, too, your hand,
And I will look upon my hand, unfurled,
And so the mist of both our worlds
May come to touch us both,
And send the spirits soaring
From her mouth.
Yes, apostrophes! They're fun, they're flexible, and they're as easy or hard as you want to make them. Let's see if can we get a few posted, then I'll call a deadline.
