Tonight my friend Lisa is offering us, as a dVerse Poets Prosery Prompt, a line from Alice Walker’s poem ‘Before you knew you owned it’. The line for us to incorporate, unchanged apart from punctuation, is ‘make of it a parka for your soul’.

By way of synchronicity the dVerse prompt followed closely an email from a dear niece, who is undergoing key-hole surgery on Thursday.

So my Prosery became a letter to (my) Alice, and checked in at 144 words. Just what the doctor ordered! 






Dear Alice
I read with warmth your second email, followed by another from dVerse Poets from whom writing prompts emanate.
(Tonight's Prosery Prompt from another Alice: Walker, whose 'Color Purple' is well known.)
Niece Alice, I'm looking at a beautiful carved-and-turned pelvis-shaped wooden bowl I bought in Criccieth, mid-Wales. Soon before your marriage to Mark, and nearly donated for that. 
Instead I sent you a token for household items, and parked the bowl in my then-shrine-corner, filled with beautiful pebbles and topped with a woven willow trefoil.
All these years later, and on the eve of your womb operation, I discern that your womanly abdomen speaks to my crone's hip-bowl. 
I want to pass the totem of capacity, spaciousness and grace on to you, for whatever you want to make of it. A parka for your soul, to hold you gently as you heal... 
 
	© Kathy Labrum McVittie 17 February 2025