“Axis Mundi”

For some reason working off a prompt can be an effective method for me in poetry, even though it tends to be absolutely ineffective for fiction. In this case, the prompt was from a title generator, which gave me “The Titan in the Forest;” given my mythological tendencies, that immediately sent my thoughts in the direction of the World Tree, one of the common images for an axis mundi — a vertical locus that connects the earth to the heavens and/or underworld. I wound up writing it as what I called an inverse mirror fib, a “fib” being a poem that follow the Fibonacci sequence: one syllable in the first line, one in the second, two in the third, then three, five, eight, and you can keep going but your lines will get pretty unwieldy pretty fast. I flipped that and mirrored it, so the poem starts out with long lines, narrows, and widens again . . . which was my stealthy way of doing something in the general direction of what’s called a “concrete poem,” where the lines are shaped to echo the subject matter of the piece: in this case, a tree’s branches and roots!

It’s been accepted by Eye to the Telescope for their plant-themed issue, and you can read it for free online!