Imitation Poem

This is good exercise for anyone who hasn't tried it before. (And enjoys writing poetry.) Find a poem that you enjoy by a poet that you feel is not in your style and imitate it as best you can. Create your own poem but try to figure out what they "do" in that poem. Everything from line length to rhythms. It helps a lot when you're really stuck in your writing.

Here's James Tate's poem, "The Radish" which I imitated. If you're interested. Here's my take.

The Skipping Stone

I was holding the most perfect skipping stone.
I was feeling how world smooth, how without catch.
Admiring it like a mini UFO landed in my hands.
And I knew that I would throw it like a meteor,
cutting through waves like Ginsu, like a particle beam,
and when I put it to my ear I knew it had come to me,
navigated the architecture of the ocean to give me something.
Its voice was small like a mouse in a screaming subway.
And like that mouse, it was urgent, it was waiting for one someone
to listen to the message its little mouse ears heard
in the gears and gauges of the earth, deep in the underneath
where only mice like this go, and hear the oracles of dirt.
And it stood there, polite, dodging the heels and toes
of the unaware, just sitting on its furry haunches,
balancing on the stub of tail it half lost between metal wheel and track.
In its pink fingers it held a gum wrapper, covered with words
scrawled all night with the disembodied tip of a tail dipped
in the well of a broken open Bic.
But just as I’m about to hear this dilemma
a wave steals the messenger stone back into its endlessness.
I drop and needle the sand and surf
and ask a boy who is hiccupping back tears
if he has seen my stone to which he, his voice hitching, asks
if I have seen his mother.
And I think what a doomed people we are anyways,
but I leave my stone, lead his sticky hand down the beach
and just before the sun turns down the evening shades,
I see this Mom, a girl I used to get all leg twisted with
in her hammock, and used to jump fences with for midnight pools,
and she whisks him into her arms, crying like the end of the world,
and I find my stone, right between my toes, and turn back towards
the beach I know where I sit in the moon’s sorry pull
and open that stone like a clam where within is a gum wrapper
rolled into an allergy pill, from which I read the calligraphy of a mouse:
“Tonight, you and I will be the only ones who know Death’s come.
He will arrive like a Daddy back from a trip, his arms full with gifts.
And within one, wrapped in clothes you thought you lost,
will be a skipping stone. This you will throw back
and the whole world will have until it sinks.”