Margaret’s Song

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  There was a king in Thule,  True even to the grave;  To whom his dying mistress  A golden beaker gave.  At every feast he drained it,  Naught was to him so dear,  And often as he drained it,  Gush’d from his eyes the tear.  When death came, unrepining  His cities o’er he told;  All to his heir resigning,  Except his cup of gold.  With many a knightly vassal  At a royal feast sat he,  In yon proud hall ancestral,  In his castle o’er the sea.  Up stood the jovial monarch,  And quaff’d his last life’s glow,  Then hurled the hallow’d goblet  Into the flood below.  He saw it splashing, drinking,  And plunging in the sea;  His eyes meanwhile were sinking,  And never again drank he. “Margaret’s Song” by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) in “Faust. Part I.”

Forward Motion

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 The next few weeks I will be consulting a list of writing prompts to use as springboards. The last couple of years have been difficult in more ways to tell and a few things I once enjoyed have fallen by the wayside, writing being one of them. So as I follow these prompts, posts will be random in topic, as demonstrated in the last two. 

Some posts may be commentary, some instructional, some imaginative, even speculative, respectively. I am challenging myself not to skip, but to work straight through the spring boards in their own published sequence. It’s not about generating content. It’s about strengthening a muscle. It’s about rekindling a flame. It’s about stretching the imagination, which has real world applications in matters such as problem-solving.


My goal is to write in the style of NaNoWriMo; that is to write spontaneously with as little editing as possible, even if that means filling up at least two pages a day of absolute crap (to be clear I endeavor to write at least one page in my personal journal and at least one page for this blog). As one writer said, “draft ugly, edit pretty.” Who knows, maybe at the end of the exercise a book could be produced out of it! 

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