Salty like hot dogs (and tears). Sweet like marmalade (and life).
Lesley Scoble challenged us to write an Ekphrastic Poem based on a piece of music from Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. Challenge is very much the operative word here.
I ended up with a concrete poem –a poem makes active use of the arrangement of the words to create a visual art object — that depicts a crescendo. Life is just one big crescendo and descrescendo.
My darling,
Much better than quarreling
Is this: I will stroke your hair,
Swear
Devotion
To you while you’ve no notion
(Have you?) of whose side I’m on.
Yawn
My pretty;
Sleep on my lap. I pity
Your great surprise when you wake.
Take
Care, dumb thing.
Out of the strong came something.
Sweet fool, you yielded to me
Key
Expertise
That I might put you at ease
And take from you that which God
[prod]
Had conferred
On you. Soon the deed’s occurred —
Come take the hair of this mutt!
Cut!
The W3 prompt for this week was to write an ekphrastic poem about the Rubens’ painting of Samson and Delilah.
The more I looked at the painting, the more I disliked Delilah. She’s so false. What did Samson see in her? Well, I think that’s pretty clear in the painting, too.
This is an Irish form I’ve used before: deibide baise fri toin. Syllable count for each quatrain: 3-7-7-1. Rhyme scheme: aabb. The first two lines rhyme on two syllables, and the last two rhyme on one.
The poet of the week gave an additional challenge of including a line from Samson’s riddle: “Out of the strong came something sweet.”
Dear Barbara,
Remember when
We used to pray
And say amen
To all of our
Troubles and cares
Passing them on –
Gone – to “One Upstairs”
Who heard our words
Read our mettle
Enclosing us
Thus to settle
And face what came–
Oh! Life was hard
Especially
Yours. See — one card
Then another —
Life dealt you crap
Death, illness, hell
Fell in your lap
Week after week
We bowed our heads
We wept, we prayed
Life frayed to shreds
Why did we stop?
I don’t recall
Did we give up?
Our cups to fall
And break, as did
Our friendship? I
Wish I knew what
Shut that door. Why?
Why do people
Move on from God,
Friends, prayers, tears?
Fears? Fatigue? Fraud?
I am a fraud
Yes, yes. That’s true
But we did pray
A day or two
I was out for a drive with a friend the other night, and suddenly I recognized the landscape, the roads, the buildings. It had been years since I had driven out there but I used to meet weekly to pray with a friend. She lived out there.
We stopped meeting rather abruptly some 20 years ago — and I don’t remember why. I don’t remember a falling out. I don’t remember a lot of things from those years. They were so stressful.
But the stresses in my life were miniscule in comparison with hers.
This poem came out of the hashing around of those memories.
I need to add that faith failures — the doubts, the fatigue — they are all MINE, not hers. Pretty sure, anyway.
Plants weren’t watered while I was gone
My son forgot
The geraniums were wilted
So jilted, fraught
A good watering – life appears
Or reappears
I should say – its posture improves –
Life moves, cheers
Yes, cheers my heart. All is not lost
Tiny buds burst
Within days — I am delighted
A righted thirst
The W3 prompt this week: Write a poem of three stanzas inspired by the phrase ‘A Wilted Flower’ —Rhyming: Optional
The story in the poem is true. I didn’t know I needed to tell my son to water the plants. Geraniums are so resilient. I wish I could say the same of some of my other plants.
I chose another unpronounceable Irish form: the decnad cummaisc, a form that employs quatrains with both end and internal rhymes. Here are the guidelines:
Exhilirating is the word I’d use
Walking on the beam to reach the loft
Yes, barefoot! I had no use for shoes
Down below, I knew the hay was soft
Walking on the beam to reach the loft
Having climbed up, up, up in that old barn
Down below, I knew the hay was soft
My brother grabbed my arm as if to warn
Having climbed up, up, up in that old barn
What we were about to do seemed unsure
My brother grabbed my arm as if to warn
But we both felt the danger was the allure
What we were about to do seemed unsure
The warm and musty hay beckoned below
But we both felt the danger was the allure
The pigeons cooed, outside I heard a crow
The warm and musty hay beckoned below
Would we do it? Would we take that leap
The pigeons cooed, outside I heard a crow
Our knees shook, we took a breath quite deep
Would we do it? Would we take that leap?
A silent prayer, a silenter amen
Our knees shook, we took a breath quite deep
And once done, we’d do it all again
A silent prayer, a silenter amen
Exhilirating is the word I’d use
And once done, we’d do it all again
Yes, barefoot! I had no use for shoes
This is my response to the W3 challenge this week: write a pantoum about a childhood memory. A pantoum is made up of a series of quatrains rhyming ABAB in which the second and fourth lines of a quatrain recur as the first and third lines in the succeeding quatrain; each quatrain introduces a new second rhyme as BCBC, CDCD. At the end, you loop and grab those A lines again.
When I was 7 years old, my parents bought a non-working farm with 100 acres and 4 barns to explore. It was idyllic — truly. One of the things my brother and I did was climb up into a hayloft in one of the barns and jump down into the pile of hay below. So scary. So much fun.
“Please select
Me!” She wanted to direct
The gardener as he scanned,
Hand
Already
Full of flowers, gaze steady.
He looked for one final bloom.
Gloom
Just settled
Over her. Her gold petaled
Head drooped in an oh-so-sad
Bad
Way. Downcast,
Rejected, again outcast,
Passed over. But then he stopped
Dropped
His pruner
“I wish I’d seen you sooner,”
He said to her. “You are sweet!
Meet
Your sidekicks.”
[snip!] She joined the spray, transfixed
By the beauty around her.
“We’re
Delighted
You can join us!” She sighted
A welcoming rose and mum.
“Come!”
This is for the W3 challenge this week. Heather (Sgeoil) challenged the participants to do a little personification. I had an idea for a flower being plucked from the garden for a bouquet (inspired in part by the bouquet that was on my bedside table when I stayed at my son’s house). My idea involved going in that sacrificial direction of losing life for the sake of something bigger. But, as you can see, it went in a totally different direction.
I wish I understood my own process.
AND — because I like Celtic forms, I went with a Deibide Baise Fri Toin, and Irish form with aabb rhyme scheme and syllable count of 3-7-7-1 for each stanza. The first two lines rhyme on a 2 syllable word and the last two lines rhyme on one syllable.
I have just
One wild life —
So should I
Avoid strife?
When roads di-
Verge, should I
Choose safe? or,
Wonder why
I paused at
All — and plunge
Headlong in
A great lunge
Of faith. I
Think I’d like
To rise, go,
Walk, swim, bike
Encounter
Life in all
Its pain and
Joy. Enthrall
In being
Alive! Yes!
I needn’t
Second-guess
Brains in head
Feet in shoes
This must be
Life I choose
Tiny nods to a few poets who inspire me.
I was beyond honored to have been chosen as Poet of the Week by Kerfe who blogs at MethodTwoMadness for The Skeptic’s Kadish W3 prompt.
What does that even mean?
Well, I’m traveling this week, so I chose a theme of travel.
Easy, right?
Wrong!
I’ve scrapped so many poems this week! The pressure is on! Between walks in beautiful British Columbia, I’ve tried to write and the struggle is real.
But I started a Lenten devotional on Ash Wednesday based on the poems of Mary Oliver so I tried to let her inspire me a little.
He placed his right hand just back of her waist
She placed her left hand on his shoulder
They danced with hands clasped in a stiff, awkward way
Space between them? Well, it was well-spaced.
That space closed midst the dance, he leaned in and told her,
“Thank you for dancing. My wife died last year.
Today is quite hard, our anniversary day.”
Adding a hug, “Thank you for being here.”
This is my response to the W3 prompt this week: Write a San San poem.
The San San poetic form has three requirements:
For this challenge, it also needed to be inspired by a dance or a song about dancing. The song below was my inspiration. It always gives me that ache-y feeling.
They are just boys; do they understand
This greater good they’re fighting for, the issues here at hand?
What thing that draws them to this fight?
Is it some deep deep sense of right?
Or, did someone paint a picture that was golden-tinged and grand?
Ah, to fill the lists — recruitment, drafts, all planned
Each regiment, platoon, division must be manned
Focus on the good they’ll do; keep their prospect bright
They are just boys.
Send them off with pageantry — a drum and bugle band!
Remind them that they’re going to a far-off glorious land!
And never say a single word that might evoke some fright –
Pump them full of pride! Ah, ’tis such a glorious sight
To watch them while they board the ship and leave their motherland –
They are just boys.
The W3 Challenge this week was to write a rondeau on the topic of Freedom. This is less about freedom and more about war. Does it bother anyone else that here is the United States we fill our military with kids; they can fight for us but we don’t allow them to legally drink a beer!
Moms tend to worry, you
know. It’s what we do
best. Especially
when a little chick
flies from the nest across
a pond — THE pond. So quick-
ly she had gone from
little girl to adult, and just
like that she flew
to London, thrust
into problem-solving far
from home where I
cannot rescue her ’cause
she must learn to fly
on her own —
To hear her voice
and see her face
— the magic of
technology —
took the worry
from my anxious
heart (thank you, God!)
Daughter #3 flew to London for a semester. While I was busy grousing about driving in New Jersey, she was boarding a plane.
We thought we had checked everything, but when she arrived at Heathrow, she found that her international phone plane with Verizon did not work. Of course, it was the middle of the night and I didn’t see her message until I got up an hour later.
I couldn’t reach her. A thousand thoughts — most of them involving disaster — raced through my mind.
When I heard her voice, I finally exhaled.
This is my response to the W3 challenge this week:
Write a jamb-jitsu. What’s a jamb jitsu, you ask?
Hot Dogs and Marmalade 