After the reading, talking briefly to you
and recalling another time – when I, Steve and
you shared coffee conversation – you remembered me.
A wonderful lie. We are men, and
we jump like paratroopers and shout Geronimo.

Terrance Hayes
invented a poetry form he calls the Golden Shovel. You take a line (or lines) from a poem you admire, and use each word in the line (or lines) as an end word in your poem while maintaining the order. So, if you choose a line with six words, your poem would be six lines long. (A stanza with 24 words yields a poem of 24 lines long.) Give credit to the original poet.
I chose a poem by Gary Snyder called “Changing Diapers” and used his line “you and me and Geronimo.” My poem came out of a brief walking talk with Snyder recently when he read at the Dodge Poetry Festival in New Jersey. It also recalls a longer conversation we had at another Dodge Festival more than 20 years ago. A Golden Shovel poem does not have to be about the same subject as the poem you used, but it might have a connection.
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