I spoke a wish into the dark,
as if I dropped a fish into a well,
then paused for a returning sound to tell

if water caught it, not dry stone,
not dead coins only. Not a sound came back:
That wish went its own way, and left no track.

The night is long. Where may a wish not go,
when every word’s alive, and each is true?
In such a span of time, what can’t it do?

Under the hood:

This was very loosely based on a suggestion from the website napowrimo.net to write a palinode. In a palinode, you’re supposed to take back something you’ve said in (I suppose) an earlier ode… the best I could do on short notice, though, was to cast aspersions on the subject matter of the poem in the poem’s title. I’m not sure if there’s a technical literary term for that, though from what I know of the world, I think it very likely that there is.

Image: Big Fish by Flickr user Hat4Rain, published under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) license.