NaPoWriMo Day 25 Prompt – a poem that begins with a line from another poem
Hmmm, well, I started looking through my bookshelves for enticing first lines. Two and a half hours later I was still sitting on the floor of my bedroom with books spread all over the place, having fallen down yet another rabbit hole. So, I stood up and gave myself a stern talking to. "Get to work!" I told myself. What I discovered is that the first line often plays a really huge part in the direction a poem goes. I have this amazing little book of haiku from Everyman's Library Pocket Poets, selected and edited by Peter Washington. I thought it would be quite interesting to take the first line of a haiku by Basho and turn the poem in an entirely different and much more modern direction. It was fun, so I did two. Please don't bash me (ha ha) for the first one being more than 17 syllables. Ezra Pound wrote some much longer than that. Here are mine:
The moon swiftly fleeting
in the rear view mirror
of Apollo eleven
Coolness
in Levi’s
and black leather