Twitter and My Grandparent’s Farm

So! It’s been a long time since my last post. Last April to be exact. I hope everyone has had a great – and safe – Summer/Winter, depending on which side of the equator you’re on.

You’re reading the title and thinking to yourselves, (I know you are. I can sense it.) “Wow! You’re grandparents got WiFi on their farm.” Uh…no. My grandparents are long since deceased and the farm is long gone. However, if you follow my Twitter account (jimgblack1), you will see the following in my timeline, #vss365, which is a daily writing prompt exercise. The prompts are given every morning and a different very talented writer is responsible for each different month. VSS stands for Very Short Story and, since Twitter only allows 280 characters, yes, you have to keep it short. When I first discovered it I was writing almost every day. After a break I decided to get back to the daily exercise to keep practicing my writing, and it’s a great way to meet like-minded writers.

The prompt for August 1st was cellar. I decided that a theme was what I needed to stay on task, and cellar got me thinking about the old farmstead that my grandparents bought in Georgia back in the 1970s. The old farm became my theme. I was doing good the first three days. The prompts were cellar, sacrifice and Jupiter. Yes, I even came up with a good one for Jupiter. Today’s word, though, had me stumped. Empress! Oh, my. There aren’t any empresses that I know of in Georgia, and certainly none in the 1970s. Suddenly, as things sometimes do, a whole plethora of words invaded my head and a poem started taking form. It’s way too long for #vss365, however, I thought I’d write the whole thing here as a blog, and put an excerpt on the Twitter prompt. So…here goes:

This word, I think will stump me

This one will make me fall

There are no empresses in Georgia

At least, none that I recall

I started my mind wandering

Over animals, minerals and plants

Were there Empress Roses, Empress Quartz

Maybe Empress Ants

So I sat down to an online search

Just to see what I could see

And staring back from the screen

The Chinese Empress Tree

Then all at once I saw it

Very clearly in my head

That stately Chinese Empress

Growing beside the shed

It’s petals pink and delicate

Sickly sweet was it’s smell

The colors reminded me closely

Of an abalone Shell

Okay, by now you’ve figured it out

So I guess I will confess

“A Chinese Empress Tree in Georgia

Surely, man you jest”

Maybe there wasn’t an Empress Tree

On the acreage where I once romped

But you gotta admit

It’s a hell of a poem

And it helped me with this prompt!

Haha!! Those last two lines crack me up! Thank you for reading and supporting my blog and my writing.

Back to the Anvil!