A Writing Prompt

I hate cleaning house, but love it at the same time.

I hate my over-dried hands, the smell of bleach and emptying out the vacuum canister.

But... I love coming across books I enjoyed, old fortunes from Chinese take-out or bits of writing I scratched down on cocktail napkins.

What I found today was a poem I'd written down after I'd heard it many, many years ago on a Nina Simone album (if you don't know Nina, run - don't walk over to your iTunes store and check her out). Anyway, I remember hearing the poem first and then having it come up in a college class right around the same time.

Anyway, two simple stanzas reminded me of living in a 5th floor walk up in Hartford, working in the theater for a crazy man, going to school and being in love with a beautiful young man who played guitar, sang like an angel and loved when I read him my writing - right up 'til the day he discovered he loved men.

It was a perfectly preserved memory prompted by a hurriedly scribbled note on a sheet of a yellow legal pad. My own personal writing prompt - that I'd thought I'd share with you all:

She does not know
Her beauty,
She thinks her brown skin
Has no glory.
If she could dance
Naked,
Under palm trees
And see her image in the river
She would know.

But there are no palm trees
On the street,
And dishwater gives back no images.

(William Waring Cuney)