#7 Physical Distancing Prompt: Allen Ginsberg and the American Sentence

If you wrote a haiku yesterday, you are ready to write what Allen Ginsberg called an American Sentence:

Examples of American Sentences (a sentence containing 17 syllables)

What Another Vet Said
after Hearing Me Read
My Vietnam Poetry

No one shot at me,
but everything I had was gone
when I came home.

— Terry Hertzler

Today's prompt: Write one sentence that contains:

•   17 syllables
•  Other aspects of haiku are optional: mention of a season, a turn or caesura or leap, image, 3 lines

Bonus Prompt: And if you want to be especially ambitious today, look at this 14 line sonnet created with American sentences of 17 syllables for each line!

 

Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl (after Rembrandt)

She comes out of the dark seeking pie, but instead finds two dead peacocks.

One is strung up by its feet. The other lies on its side in a pool

Of its own blood.  The girl is burdened with curly bangs.  A too-small cap.

She wanted pie, not these beautiful birds. Not a small, dusky apple

From a basket of dusky apples. Read in. Choose a dusky apple.

She sleepwalked to this window, her body led by its hunger for pie.

Instead this dead beauty, gratuitous. Scalloped green feathers. Gold breast.

Iridescent-eyed plumage, supine on the table. Two gaudy crowns.

She rests her elbows on the stone windowsill. Why not pluck a feather?

Why lean against the gold house of the rich and stare at the bird’s dead eye?

The girl must pull the heavy bird into the night and run off with it.

Build a fire on the riverbank. Tear away the beautiful feathers.

Suck scorched tough dark meat off of hollow bones. Look at her, ready to reach.

She’d hoped for pie. Meringue beaded gold. Art, useless as tits on a boar.

-          - Diane Seuss (each line is an American sentence, sonnet form with 14 lines – no “I”)