One of my favourite parts of sharing poems online is realising the work doesn’t end when I hit publish. Sometimes a poem becomes a doorway: someone else walks through it and comes back with a new poem in their hands, or find something resonating in what they have already written.
Recently, a few poets sent me response pieces to different posts of mine—Water / Air / Fire / Earth, Three Poems About the Body as Weather, Two Poems About My Father, and The Girl Who Left with You. I’m sharing four of those responses here, because I love how each poem keeps the original thread but shifts the light.
Credits:
Thomas Cleary — Just For The Hell Of It
Jeanne Vessantra — Echo of I
Chris Heape — Rimnír
Thomas Cleary responding to “Water / Air / Fire / Earth”
In my original post, I shared four poems moving through the elements as sensations—water, air, fire, and earth—and what they stir in the body. This was Thomas’s response:
Within
The earth
which once gave birth
through the fife of air
we call life
blowing softly
through the embouchure
of a mother’s kiss and coo
seems later a hit or miss
as we scorn life’s latent thorn
sometimes wishing for unborn
endurance
as we tumble and break
an agate cracked
revealing a traumatized beauty
gleaming within.
What I love here is the movement from element to instrument to body — air as music, endurance as something cracked open and still gleaming.
Jeanne Vessantra responding to “Three Poems About the Body as Weather”
In my original post, I shared three poems that treat the body as landscape—something that shifts, carries, breaks, and remembers like weather. Here’s Jaenne’s response:
I am the storm.
My body breaks inside it.
A season with no shelter.
Only wind inside my skin.
People move through me –
without knowing they are already passing through weather.
That last line hits like a quiet reveal — how we carry weather in us, and how others live inside it without noticing.
Jeanne Vessantra responding to “The Girl Who Left with You”
In my original post, I wrote about grief, girlhood, and the versions of ourselves we leave behind — how sometimes a loss is really the loss of who we were. Jeanne shared this poem as a comment to the post:
She left,
crawling on the floor,
a flood of tears in her eyes.
Yet I do not cry –
I only observe.
Her anguish,
her strange tranquillity
tightening around my neck,
crawling down
to my feet.
Sometimes I feel pity –
yes, pity for her.
She collapses,
crushed against the ground.
But I keep rising,
again and again,
from the dust.
I’m drawn to the tension here — witnessing and survival in the same breath. The ending feels like an insistence: even when the scene stays heavy, the speaker refuses to stay down.
Chris Heape responding to “Two Poems About My Father”
Chris shared that “Rewind” began with a sentence he heard in response to a theatre piece about dementia, and he started sketching with that line in mind — especially the father’s inability to recognise his daughter. Writing into the daughter’s perspective, he followed the profound sense of rejection that can come with dementia: someone who once knew you intimately no longer knows you. From there, the poem turns to a second register—the daughter remembering her father when he was still whole, working as a blacksmith. I feel that shift resonating deeply with my own poem “My Father’s Voice,” which also tries to hold the person my father was alongside the person he is now.
Chris experimented with fragmentation in early drafts, letting the broken cadence echo dementia’s disorientation — memory failing, language faltering, identity slipping in and out of reach — before the poem opens into the forge. Chris asked that I share the full poem here:
Rewind
Maybe he knows he doesn’t know Is someone
Hammering
outside at six in the morning There’s no-one there
Not a sound
Please stop the noise I can’t sleep He can’t
Sleep
They’re visiting again Who? Them again! Oh! Yes
Ok Thanks
Hello Yes nice to see you Who’s this? I know
Who you are Who’s She?
Ask her Ask her to go away Why is she so
Upset?
Fix the hammering will you Six in the morning
It never stops
But Pa there is no noise Yes there is You don’t
Understand
Stop! Stop! Wind wind Rewind unwind
Slow down
Rewind to where you lost yourself Go to
Where
you slipped away I’ve lost part of my father So who
Am I?
How can I fix what’s gone? Please go
Back
to who you were Dear Pa I love you
But when
I’m with you I can’t reach you So I hold myself
Pretend
it’s you I want to give you my love my understanding
But you’re no longer
There
• • •
If you were here I’d be standing in the door to your
Forge
Watch with a daughter’s wonder how you balance your
Burly swagger
to wield your blacksmith’s craft Watch how your
Smoked-smudged
hands grip your hammer in the one hold a pair of
Tongs
with the other Hear the clang of your blows as you
Strike
the iron’s white-hot gleam Again and again the coke
Flares
the iron sparks shower their plumes and the anvil
Rings
out as you craft the glow-tipped iron to a smithed
Meld
I watch as the water steams its burn and the iron
Submits
to its new form
If you were still here
I’d hold
your calloused hands now exhausted
Stiff-curled
around the hammer that’s no longer
There
Read the full story behind the poem.
Have you ever seen themes in your own work than resonates with another writer? Or if you’ve ever written a response poem — what called you into it? And if you’ve never tried: consider this an invitation. Choose a line or image that stays with you and write from there.
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