These are the things I wrote for my creative writing class this past term. We actually, for a class about creative writing, didn't do that much writing.
From the exercise for writing a fourteenth way of looking at a blackbird:
The refrigerator
reflected the blackbird
staring through
the blinds.
A poem about a place without using any poetic devices (tell that to the rest of the class):
Hiding from Kennedy Airport
adhesive left on beige tiles
not quite perfect in their placement
reflected in the mirror
they dull
beside gleaming porcelain
And the big assignment, the longer poem on any subject:
saints rest
late, late, after the dying light
forth and back along the edge
where the waves and smoothed and smothered
the rocks and sand, ground
pushed away the seaweed and grass
below the divide of trenches
left from days of hurricane wind
wearing a change of sweater and jeans
stomachs filled with last-place-open drive-thru
laughing at the the cars
with steamed up windows
annoyed at the headlights
and the pounding music over the constant tide
disturbing the rest
(sometimes in the rain and fog
without the headlights the road disappeared from hard to see
we sat in our car, amazed
the light devouring water missing from the scene)
we'd remember then
how children washed out from this beach
in hurricanes cars slipped
how the the graveyward two coves down eroded in a gale
coffins washing up along here in the quiet
just our feet crunching in the sand
the drumming ocean
things weren't as bad as they seemed
was it a day or lives ago
under the streetlights
© lily keller 2001