Today’s prompt was to take a bunch of news headlines and mix them up to create a poem. I didn’t exactly do that, but the news did swirl in my brain. The poem originally had a first stanza with a bunch of headlines in it, but the poem seemed stronger without that stanza, hence veering away from the prompt.
—-
News at Night
Events
deemed terrible enough
to be interesting
arrive on a crawl
across the bottom
of my TV screen,
a litany of dread.
I absorb them
as abstraction,
an endless line
of sheep counted
so I can sleep.
Yet come daylight,
even the flowers
open with screams.
I saw your original in my feed reader, Matt, and liked it but I think you’re right about this being stronger. The reader’s mind can create its own, probably more terrible, headlines. I hadn’t seen the Chinese kindergarten item though, and that is shocking.
Hea…veeeee…screaming flowers..not good.. Don’t watch the news…too depressing…
Have some fun…terrorise the neighbours!
I’ve become less and less informed because of this very thing. The conspiratorial part of my brain believes “they” want the news to be so damn depressing we won’t pay attention to what “they” are doing.
WOW! Powerful poem, Matt. That last line is dynamite! I’d rather watch Seinfeld re-runs than the evening news. Of course, I’m not exactly informed but I laugh a lot more.
I often feel like the flowers everyday after perusing the headlines, Matt! (Thanks for stopping by earlier – I answered your questions about boobquake…)
Nice impact, I think you did the right thing veering away from prompt.
That “terrible enough to be interesting” really stands out, it’s very true. Somehow the U.S. seems to have that worse than elsewhere.
I agree with the others. Your word choices are a wonderful mixture.
you veered nicely with this..well done
sometimes it is nice to turn the sound off and watch with wonder as life passes by… waking flowers screaming that is dynamite!!!
You ended it with an appropriate bang.
Loved it. Very M. Night Shyamalan-ish (with his penchant for ‘twist endings’); specifically, the 2008 film “The Happening” comes to mind (where the killers were the plants releasing neurotoxins that made the victims commit suicide).
Thanks for sharing, and kudos. Cheers.