March 25, 2019:  The prompt for Monday’s meeting was a poem titled, Yin, by Paulann Petersen. It was just published by the Carolina Quarterly on their website.

Yin
by Paulann Petersen

You’d think water’s female aspect
would be a pond, a lake — deep,
reflective, still, taking
the sun and moon and clouds
onto its slick-shimmered skin.
Wrong. You would be
dead wrong. Being a woman, I know
at least that much about water.

One high-summer day, I stood
behind a waterfall, in a shallow cave
scooped out of the cliff’s base.
Through the cascade, I looked out and down
at the rolling pool where the water’s
falling came to its end.

Din pummeled my ears. Mist weighted
my hair. The air — smelling of
skunk cabbage, willow and mullien —
tasted fecund and wet. Deafened, mute,
I gazed through that plummet joining
a world on high to the one below,
and I knew.

The man is rock —
still, ever still, afraid to give up
his hard-won place far above the rest.
The woman sweeps right over
his prominence. In sheer free-fall,
she heads down to earth,
hellbent to reach the sea.

 

There are strong images and ideas here. Use whatever direction it takes you as your prompt.