Our friend, and recent GMU MFA graduate, Ranjani Murali is sharing her prompts after Latin American poets this week. Check poetry instigator EVERYDAY Monday through Thursday for interesting bios, poems and, of course, prompts!

Grabriela Mistral

Decalogue of the Artist

I. You shall love beauty, which is the shadow of God
over the Universe.

II.There is no godless art. Although you love not the
Creator, you shall bear witness to Him creating His likeness.

III.You shall create beauty not to excite the senses
but to give sustenance to the soul.

IV. You shall never use beauty as a pretext for luxury
and vanity but as a spiritual devotion.

V. You shall not seek beauty at carnival or fair
or offer your work there, for beauty is virginal
and is not to be found at carnival or fair.

VI. Beauty shall rise from your heart in song,
and you shall be the first to be purified.

VII.The beauty you create shall be known
as compassion and shall console the hearts of men.

VIII.You shall bring forth your work as a mother
brings forth her child: out of the blood of your heart.

IX. Beauty shall not be an opiate that puts you
to sleep but a strong wine that fires you to action,
for if you fail to be a true man or a true woman,
you will fail to be an artist.

X. Each act of creation shall leave you humble,
for it is never as great as your dream and always
inferior to that most marvelous dream of God
which is Nature.

PROMPT

Write a decalogue or a set of ten commandments addressed to a person/entity (an artist, for instance, as in Mistral’s “Decalogue of the Artist”) or a work of art (a poem, a painting, perhaps even a certain kind of cuisine or dish).

The Flower of Air*
I met her, not by chance,
standing in the middle of the meadow,
governing all who passed,
all who addressed her.

She said to me: “Climb the mountain–
I never leave the meadow.
Cut me flowers white
as snows, crisp and tender.”

I climbed the mountain
and searched where flowers whiten
among the rocks,
half sleeping, half waking.

When I came down with my burden
I found her in the middle of the meadow.
Like a crazy one, I covered her
with a deluge of lilies.

She never glanced at their whiteness.
She said to me: “Now bring me
red flowers, only the red.
I cannot leave the meadow.”

I clambered up crags with deer
and searched for flowers of madness,
those that grow red and appear
to live and die of redness.

* I wanted to call this “The Adventure”,
my adventure with Poetry. (G.M.)

PROMPT

Write a poetry adventure poem. The objective is to describe a metaphorical “poetic journey”—the process of discovering the poem (or conversely, the process of the poem eluding you). Try using either dialogue or a “uniform” stanzaic form (couplet, tercet, quatrain).