I’ve been toying with the idea of committing to creating my own project for National Poetry Month (NPM). It’s April 1st and I still haven’t decided. One thought I had was to mine my dusty trove of “I’ve been meaning to read or reread that” books and use each one to spark a poem. I thought it would be a great way to dip into those books and explore some new prompts, poets, and processes. It sounded kind of fun and relatively low-key.

With this idea in mind, I picked up Myra Cohn Livingstone’s “I Am Writing a Poem About…A Game of Poetry”, a book long-ago recommended to me and purchased, and never perused. It’s a collection of poems inspired by word play in one of Livingstone’s master classes of poetry. The first prompt she gave her students was one word: “Rabbit.”

Well, this seemed like a sign. Today is the first of the month, and anyone who has known me for any length of time knows about my obsession for trying to say “Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit” as my first words on the first day of each month. In my family, it’s a way to wish for good luck. (If you’re interested, you can read more about it here and believe me, it’s much harder than it sounds.)

So, I figured I’d write a poem inspired by the word “Rabbit” and just take it day by day. We’ll see what happens along the way!

Rabbit

No rabbits
visit my yard
pausing
nose aquiver at the scent
of clover-drenched lawn
but each month,
as I was taught,
I whisper an early morning
invocation
“Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit.”

Even though
no rabbits appear
and the luck is debatable,
I hear the echoes
of my mother’s and
grandmother’s voices–
a different sort of visitation
and perhaps the one
I was conjuring
all along.

©Molly Hogan
draft