Time to get the ball rolling.

Hello everyone.  I have just signed on as a co-founder to help manage this group.  As many of you have probably realized, the Amazing Kate sunshinegypsy has several groups going on right now (hint hint, check out the other groups if you haven't already.)

I am taking this on as a personal challenge to myself.  I do recognize a few of the faces here and hopefully I will get to know more of you.  Those of you who have seen my work will know that I have a terrible habit of writing almost exclusively about my relationships.  It's time to do a little personal growth, and I'm hoping you all feel the same.

Let's create our own little dA family here while we write, share, and explore our own.  Let's make this a safe but productive place.  I think it would be great if we could all challenge each other and give helpful feedback.  So if your strength is spelling, work as spell-checker.  If your strength is grammar, suggest those commas.  And I hope we will always feel free to share from our own experiences if a piece strikes or inspires us.

I'm hoping to do a bi-weekly prompt, not so much as a contest (although, if that appeals to the majority of you, we can certainly do that) but as a way to inspire us to write the great truths of our family.

Please, send me your ideas for prompts.  These can be in the form of a poem you've written which we can post up and each use as inspiration, a favorite quote, a news article, a song, an idea, etc.  

Prompt #1 - "Daddy"
I, personally, find it hard to write about my father and so this is a personal challenge.  Hopefully you will all undertake it as well.  To "get the ball rolling" I am putting up my favorite Daddy Poem for inspiration.  Goal time: second week of May.

EDIT We don't seem to have gotten any responses to this yet, so I'm linking mine up here to help motivate ya'll   If you write one, please note me, I will make a list and throw them all up at the beginning of the next prompt so that they are highlighted on the main page.




Daddy

by Sylvia Plath



You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time--
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You--

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two--
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.


Happy Writing.