This week’s prompt brought us from a predetermined opening line (“It is impossible to love the same person twice”) to a predetermined closing line (“A thought is as real a thing as a cannonball”), both from the notebooks of Joseph Joubert, as translated from the French by Paul Auster.
Pamela Joyce S took a few whacks at it, resulting in this lovely (and biting) poem: “The Art of Loving Thought”
You, my love, are an impossible river.
If crossing once is unwise, twice is suicide.
I steel myself and venture in, treading
tenderly among your bruised blue minnows.
Tadpoles scatter seeking cover as we
spar and bear our arms. Impossible to
win or lose, I humbly twice surrender.
But, oh my dear, your deadly art is like
seeds of shrapnel speeding through my heart.
I cannot speak, retreat, or think at all,
Your thoughts are as real as a cannonball.
Eric Fretz goes in another direction, performing great feats of wordplay that I find quite genius:
It is impossible to love the same person twice.
It isn’t possible to love the sane person’s wife.
It isn’t possible, Tulip, the sane person’s wise.
If it’s not plausible two lips, insane parson’s why.
(The crazy vicar wore a mask and never spoke in words
Except, when out of earshot, to the birds:
“Forgive me, starlings, for you know that I have sinned,”
And waited for a prophet, like the wind,
A thawed Isaiah acting as a commoner,
A thaw disaster aching as a common awl
As thou, Israel, aching as a cannon calls:
“A thought is as real a thing as a cannonball.”)
Following suggestions from fellow contributors, Byron combined parts from two entries and came up with something really special, the repetition of the last line packing a punch.
It is impossible to love the same person twice.
But it is possible to think.
To the happy man at end of day each thought is a drink
of spring water but not to the soldier in the field
or the condemned man against the wall to whom
A thought is as real a thing as a cannonball.
But our romance was different. It was a war
full of border skirmishes, ceasefire treaties
brokered by domineering hegemonic powers,
isolated anarchist outrages, antiwar protests,
and the last thoughts in a dying soldier’s mind.
A thought is as real a thing as a cannonball.
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