NaPoWriMo Day 22 - "Cornetto"

The prompt:

Finally, here’s our (optional) prompt for the day. It comes to us from Poets & Writers’ “The Time is Now” column, which provides weekly poetry prompts, as well as weekly fiction and creative non-fiction prompts.

In a prompt originally posted this past February, Poets & Writers directs us to an essay by Urvi Kumbhat on the use of mangoes in diasporic literature. As she discusses in her essay, mangoes have become a sort of shorthand or symbol that writers use to invoke an entire culture, country, or way of life. This has the beauty of simplicity – but also the problems of simplicity, in that you really can’t sum up a culture in a single image or item, and you risk cliché if you try.

But at the same time, the “staying power” of the mango underscores the strength of metonymy in poetry. Following Poets & Writers’ prompt, today I’d like to challenge you to write a poem that invokes a specific object as a symbol of a particular time, era, or place.

I struggled with the idea of this prompt, in the sense that I felt uneasy about the ideas that objects end up just standing for a whole idea or place. I'm not sure I think too much in this way (although I could be wrong), and I just don't have enough time to think too deeply.

Instead I took it in a different way, and tried to think of something that evoked a very clear memory of place for me personally. When I went to University, we had a cinema on site which showed fairly up to date films. I used to go at least a couple of times a week usually. It was a way to get out and be around people without actually having to be with people. I ended up with a kind of ritual of always buying a cornetto before a film, that I could eat to pass the time before the film started. Now if I see a cornetto, I think of nothing else but that little cinema:

The cold and the crunch take me back
Knees squashed on narrow red benches
Smells of cigarettes and stale beer
Fizz-pops of soda cans punctuate the humming
Murmurs of excitement and thoughts of expectation
And when the lights go down
No one can see that you are alone