A Poetry Prompt and a Stream of Consciousness Prompt Met in a Bar

The Stream of Consciousness Saturday word this week is notebook.

The W³ prompt for this week was to borrow the first line from another poem to use as the start of your own.

What if, I wondered this morning, I take those two prompts and mush them together?

For instance: Two roads diverged in a yellow notebook. (Sorry, Robert Frost.)

What would that look like? I picture an artist drawing a notebook — because that’s what they happened to have with them when they encountered a scene they wanted to remember. So they started drawing one road coming up from the left hand corner and another road coming up from the right. Where would they meet?

Oh wait, I just made the roads CONverging, not DIverging. I’d have to turn my notebook upside-down.

How about this one: Listen, my children, and you shall hear of the midnight notebook of Paul Revere. (Sorry, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.)

What if Paul Revere was not a man of action but a man who believed that the pen was mightier than the sword? I mean, I DO believe that words are mighty, but I’m grateful that Paul Revere rode to every Middlesex village and farm to spread the alarm instead just writing his grievances in a notebook.

How about: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s notebook? (Sorry, William Shakespeare)
A lot of the romance is gone in that one! As much as I love notebooks, I would NOT want to be compared to one, even a summer one.

Here are a few more (without my blather). Submit your own in the comments —

i thank You God for most this amazing
notebook
(e.e. cummings)

The notebook is too much with us, late and soon
(William Wordsworth)

So much depends
upon
a red note
book
(William Carlos Williams)

Ooh! One more — but it’s a children’s book (one of my favorites)

Once there was a notebook….
And she loved a little boy

That one has a lot of potential for a story about a future writer, don’t you think?

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Thanks, Linda Hill, Josie Holford and David Bogomolny for a fun prompt!