The 7x7x7x7 Writing Prompt :
Grab the 7th book from your bookshelf. Open it up to page 7. Pinpoint the 7th sentence on the page. Begin a poem that begins with that sentence and limit it in length to 7 lines.
Grab the 7th book from your bookshelf. Open it up to page 7. Pinpoint the 7th sentence on the page. Begin a poem that begins with that sentence and limit it in length to 7 lines.
So my dear friend, Corinne, put up this blog challenge as an FB status and soon all hell broke loose. Women in all shapes and sizes began hitting their keyboards with various suggestions of how this could become a big thing in our group. Dissections led to excuses, delays, requests, groans, moans and wishful thinking. Trust us to wander all over the world, before we settle down to doing what was asked in the first place.
Bhavana, true to her blog name, quietly tilled her vast vocabulary to fertilize it with her seven lines. Simple but powerful lines that spoke silently with every word. I just had to go look for my seventh book! I had been too lazy this month and neglected my blog for far too long…….
Midnight’s Children has long been on my to-read list. Any wonder then, it was the seventh book, lying there, gathering dust? The sale tag had still not been removed. (Yes, I can ignore you if I am not in the mood.) The book begins with a page marked with a Roman IX . So, I did what Corinne had done herself. I counted to page seven and took it from there. Ok, Salman Rushdie writes very long sentences. I had to count thrice!!!
I finally picked what struck me in the seventh sentence ‘A wedding’, a paragraph…….
A wedding, a paragraph
In the chapter of life
Marriage is the book
Where memories celebrate
Your path, your destiny
Together, alone, until
the sunset fades forever
I am just back from a fantastic beach wedding. I was reminded of mine. I remembered my parents’. It would have been 39 years this Jan. My father-in-law just celebrated his 50th, even though, my mum-in-law passed away 17 years ago.
Why do we celebrate a marriage? And, I say marriage, not wedding. Because a wedding is for a day, a marriage is day in and day out. Of course, it takes guts and gumption not to kill each other over the years. But, it also takes a whole lot of courage to start again when you think it’s all over. And we do that, not because it would mean an investment in training another person to understand us. It is because, somewhere, deep down, we want the person to know and love us inspite of being ‘us’.
The best explanation of marriage I’ve ever had is this fabulous piece of dialogue from the movie “Shall we dance?” Yes, we do need a witness to our lives. Because, tomorrow does eventually come.
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