I clocked in at 9:03 p.m. on Saturday night for the Poetry Half-Marathon, June 13, after a day that could only be described as chaotic.
My hairdresser was out of town unexpectedly, and her first suggestion for getting my hair fixed the day before hadn’t panned out at all, so I drove back to Tazewell, my hometown, 90 minutes away (each way), to have Miss Sharon do my hair. She’s had her own shop since I was in high school. If anyone could pull it off, I figured it would be her. I’d arrived at 11:10 for an 11:30’ish appointment, which started after 12:30. Miss Sharon is much in demand, and I was just thrilled to get worked in before she called it a day! I got back to Bristol around 2:45 p.m. and decided I needed a nap if I had any chance whatsoever of making it through the night.
At about 4:30 p.m., I got up and started applying makeup for my outside author pictures at Emory & Henry, to begin at 6:30 p.m., a half-hour away. (That was the reason for my big hair dilemma.) God bless my Mary Kay friend, Christie, who kept looking at selfies I sent her and telling me what to do long-distance. I left the house at 5:45 and pulled into Emory around 6:20. Pat Shrader (my friend and the photographer), wasn’t there yet. He was driving from Asheville, NC. My dear friend Ann Baber Fleenor called from Abingdon, though, and asked if it was still okay for her to come along, and I said, absolutely, so she started from nearby Abingdon, arriving before Pat and I had even started walking the campus to start the shoot. We focused primarily on the Tobias Smith Cabin, the place Ann and I had staked out on a previous trip to campus, but covered Wiley Hall, the cool sidling sidewalk, and the Duck Pond, as well, wrapping it up and hugging good-bye around 8:30 p.m.
So, I logged in to see the first prompt. Write a poem about reflection. That was easy. I’d just spent the evening with two wonderful friends, reflecting on our time at our beloved alma mater thirty-five years ago. There were also the reflections from the Duck Pond itself.
Each hour, at the top of the hour, a new prompt arrived.
A Poem about noodles.
A poem about something that used to be routine but no longer is.
A poem using “old snow.”
A poem about witnessing something unexpected.
A poem about a journey.
A poem using “we awake” three times.
A poem where every line has six words in it.
A poem about pigeons.
A poem about the night sky that doesn’t have the moon in it.
A poem containing the word “whelm.”
A poem about light.
The hardest hours to stay awake were 3 a.m.-6 a.m. for me. I admit I devised a way to post a poem at the end of one hour and at the beginning of the next hour, and sleep for about 75 minutes a couple of times during the half-marathon. There was no penalty for posting late, as long as you finished by 9 a.m. It was a really cool experience, and I have twelve new drafts to work on. I wasn’t sure I would work with their prompts when I started, but I found them useful and pertinent to what I had inside me waiting to come out. I wasn’t worth a thing for the next two days, but yes, I would do it again. And next year, if I’m not dashing around like a chicken with her head cut off, I’d really love to try the whole 24-hour marathon.
I think my favorite poem I got out of it was one about my mom and her love of a recipe using noodles, then her disappointment when our budget called for egg noodles instead of rigatoni, and it made the dish taste different. It made me miss her and realize how much she sacrificed for so very long.
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