Poetry Thursday: Uncorked

This week's prompt was offered by Polka Dot Witchy and is hosted by jillypoet.

The prompt asked us to look at what we are holding back and how we would feel to uncork whatever that was. I started thinking of the literal cork--wine, champagne, things under pressure and that led me to water in a creek and to this poem of casting away.

Tashlich is a tradition that is associated with Rosh Hashonnah, the Jewish New Year, in which we are invited to symbolically throw away anything that we have been holding onto that doesn't serve us.

Our family often does a private Taschlich using the little creek that runs past our house. It empties into the Charles River and during heavy rains, becomes a raging torrent.

Navigate over to Jillypoet's blog and to the comments section of this week's post to find links to other poetry thursday 'uncorked' poems along with the url for next week's poetry thursday host.

Tashlich at Cheesecake Brook

A month without rain; fish and turtles
retreat, swallowed by the wider mouth
of the Charles where even the snowy

egret is mired in mud. Still we gather
here, pockets filled with week-old bread
and year-old sins, eager for the current

to scour the banks clean. There is more silt
than flow. I hurl hunks of stale baguette
and green-tinged sub rolls. This is impatience,

this jealousy. I keep missing the narrow thread
of moving water. The sky is relentless
blue. It would be sacrilege to pray

for clouds, for the rush and spill of storm
grates to empty into this tiny culvert
just for the benefit of my failings.

--LJCohen, 2007