The Knife, Chapter 6, Page 16

Last week we celebrated our second Annual Party on the Deck for Wednesday Afternoon Writers. It’s fun to see that we are still together and writing with fervor. What started as an invitation to friends to join me to write once a month on their choice of any Wednesday afternoon, has turned into a group of lovely people who make it their goal to come every week. We write from a prompt, share and laugh. We even win contests! Niki Kessinger was the winner for her story of exactly 100 words at 100WordStory.com.

At our party we ate and laughed and, of course, wrote. I was recently inspired by Wave Books and their Erasure poems. I visited the Gutenberg Project and chose a handful of classic texts. Each writer choose the title that interested them and went about writing an erasure poem.  See my blog post Great or Small for an explanation and my first erasure poem. Here is my poem taken from the text Paper Cutting Machine, The Knife, Chapter 6, page 16, the opening paragraph.
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To My Son
Most important
be sharp,
be of proper temper.

Correctly pull the beard.
Study carefully.

No matter how imperfect,
in spite of rigorous temper,
character honing
varies
and variations cause trouble.