I close my eyes to the darkness
It’s easier that way to not see
The suffocating night
With its lack of light
Where even shadows can’t be
It’s a deafening deaf abyss

Open your eyes; find the light

Sticking my head in the sand
I can neither see nor hear
Nor taste nor smell
Nor live my life
’tis its own hell
Sans peace, sans strife
This existence of living in fear —
I must be willing to stand

Open your eyes; find the light

I rise and lift my head high
I open my eyes to the dark
A slim shaft of light
A glimmer, yet bright
Catches my eye like a spark —
Engagement is how I defy

Open your eyes; find the light

This is my submission to this week’s W3 challenge.

Kerfe challenged us to write a bop poem titled “Instructions on Not Giving Up.“

A bop poem has three stanzas and a refrain that repeats after each stanza. It tells a story or explores a problem, a bit like a mini-drama.

1. First stanza – 6 lines
   Present a problem or situation.
2. Refrain
   A single line that repeats after each stanza. Think of it as the poem’s chorus.
3. Second stanza – 8 lines
   Expand on or explore the problem in more depth.
4. Refrain
   Repeat the same line.
5. Third stanza – 6 lines
   Show a solution or a failed attempt to solve the problem.
6. Refrain
   Repeat it one last time.

The other night I listened to an artist describing her process. She said that painting has taught her to look for the light. I need to remember to do that.

The water laps at Liberty Island
Give me
Your tired
Your poor
New York bustles on the mainland
Huddled
Masses
Yearning
My friend huddles in her home
O Mother of Exiles
Lift your lamp
Amen

This is in response to this week’s W3 challenge. The italicized words are all from The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus which appears on a plaque inside the base of the Statue of Liberty. The poem is familiar and haunting.

I have a friend who is a naturalized citizen. I met her at the gym where I work and have known her for her journey as an immigrant — the trips back to her home country to see her children and to bring food; finally being able to bring her children to live here in the USA; studying, taking, and passing the citizenship exam; buying a home here.

I hadn’t seen her in a while so I asked a mutual friend about her.

“She works [at her housekeeping job] and goes straight home every day,” the friend said. “When she gets home, she cooks and eats. She has put on a lot of weight, so now that’s another reason not to come to the gym.”

I asked why, although I was pretty sure that I knew the answer.

“She’s afraid.”

I understood that also. She looks Hispanic (because she is). Her English is heavily-accented, and gets worse under pressure.

I understand her fear.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me

We have so lost our way.

Mechanical? I am not!
Any cogs? Not in my brain!
Gears clinking? Pshaw! I forgot –
No – machinery’s a bane
I truly don’t get motors.
Laugh at my utter absence
Of comprehension.  Rotors?
Quite a puzzle. I’ve no sense!  
Use this gizmo? Okay — yes
Explain its operation?
No way! — I’d rather address
This flow’r than mechanization

The W³ challenge this week involved a dive into “vintage mechanical marvels: music boxes, paddle steamers, tractor engines, grandfather clocks, fob watches, steamships, penny-farthings—you name it.” We were told to “Craft a poem inspired by these bygone mechanisms—let your mind whirl and tick with poetic possibility. And here’s the twist: be sure to include the word ‘magniloquent’ somewhere in your poem!”

For the record, “Magniloquent describes language that is intended to sound very impressive and important, or a person who uses such language.” (From Merriam-Webster)

This poem doesn’t use magniloquent — but I did make it an acrostic.

I really DON’T understand mechanical anything. Music boxes are beautiful for the sound that comes out of them. I like tractors because I love the smell of freshly mown hay and the neat rows of it in the field. Fob watches can have beautiful cases, but better I like the way it feels — the ways its curves nestle into my palm, its weight in my hand.

To the ocean I would go
Just to see the water flow
Whooshing in and pulling back
Hearing shells go crickle-crack

On a lakeshore I could stand
Digging toes into the sand
Watching mallards swimming by
Ospreys, eagles in the sky

Rivers also beckon me
On their way to far-off sea
Current flowing, rushing on
By an unseen power drawn

Water is my great escape
So I have an oil seascape
When I’m home and cannot go
Painted ocean soothes my woe

This is my response to this week’s W³ prompt. Poet of the Week Marion Horton challenged us to

“…turn our gaze outward—to scapes. Your scape might be a landscape, seascape, cityscape, dreamscape—any view that stirs something in you. It could be drawn from memory or daily life, from a photograph or a painting, from what still stands or what’s long gone. Write in any form that helps you say what you need to say. Somewhere in your piece, be sure to include the word scape.“

The painting used to hang in our sunporch. I had to move it recently because I noticed it was being damaged by the sun and heat in that room.

I have feelings which are quite complicated
Regarding Touch-Me-Not or Jewelweed
Whether weed or flow’r can be debated
It’s both, not either-or, I will concede
After the blossoms, green pods seem to plead,
Touch me, touch me. You know that you want to.
One small touch, a fun explosion indeed!
Seeds fly out. The cycle begins anew.

I’ve been spending a fair amount of time weeding the jewelweed from the gardens. It’s my own fault. I introduced it.

One day, years ago, I was out for a walk with my children and one of them discovered that if you touch the pods on these plants growing by the path, they would explode. We all stood there for the longest exploding seed pods. It was so much fun. Finally, I broke off some stems with pods attached intact and brought them to my parents’ house.

The rest is history.

I’m weeding jewelweed — which, I have to say, is a most satisfying plant to weed. Its roots are shallow and let go of the soil so willingly.

Not like dandelions — which require that dandelion digger with a forked tip to attack the roots.

Or Japanese knotweed which require lots of oomph and a shovel with a serrated edge. Even then, it’s still everywhere.

So it’s a win-win to have jewelweed. It’s fun to seed and fun to weed.

If only it wasn’t everywhere.

This is my response to the W³ Challenge this week. The Poet-of-the-Week, Murisopsis (Val) gave us the following parameters for our poem:

• Theme: ‘Seeds’ ~ literal seeds, figurative seeds, seeds of love, hope, fear, war… you choose!
• Form:‘Huitain’
  • One 8-line stanza;
  • Rhyming: ababbcbc; 
  • Syllabic: 8 or 10 syllables per line.

Sorting through lives
Letters and photos
Trinkets and baubles
What once was important
Is no more
The poignant priorities
Tyrannies of the urgent
Become nothing but ashes

Ashes, ashes
We all fall down
While holding hands
Clinging, connecting
Laughing, crying
And supporting one another

The W³ prompt this week is write a quadrille—a 44-word poem with no required rhyme or meter — on “what remains.”

Poet of the week Sheila Bair has been caring for her mother with dementia, which is, indeed, the fading away of a person. I watched my own mother disappear that way.

This week my sister is helping me sort through the stuff that remains in the house. So many letters and papers and objects that hold memories are here. We hold them in our hands; we feel the moment for which they existed; then, it’s decision time. Save? Recycle? Gift to someone else that they, too, might hold it for a moment?

This is my response to the W3 Challenge this week, which basically is to write a poem and then feed it into http://www.spoonbill.org/n+7/, a site which “replaces the nouns with another one a bit further on in the dictionary. No AI involved.”

So — I wrote a Triolet in response to the vitriol on the news. There’s a HUGE part of me that wishes people — not politicians — could sit at the same table and listen to each other.

A triolet is a poem of eight lines, rhyming abaaabab and so structured that the first line recurs as the fourth and seventh and the second as the eighth.

My original:

I sit across the table from
One whose thoughts veer far from mine
“Tell me, friend — why so glum?”
I sit across the table from
Someone wounded by the scrum
I listen, hear the counterline
I sit across the table from
One whose thoughts veer far from mine

The Spoonbill version (with a few tweaks to make it fit the poem structure)

I sit across the tangle from
One whose times veer far from mob
“Tell me, future — why so glum?”
I sit across the tangle from
Someone wounded by the scrum
I listen, hear about your job
I sit across the tangle from
One whose times veer far from mob

_______________

New word for me, which I think I love because it so suits the situation:
Counterline: A secondary melody that contrasts with the main melody and is played at the same time.

Listen. Really listen. Can you hear both melodies?

“Without a hurt, the heart is hollow”
At 17 my heart o’erflowed–
My boyfriend left (I did not follow)
Lost, alone — I carried the load

A load of grief — weak teenage heart!
But without hope, the heart is heavy
What feels so insurmountable then
Is but a tax that life must levy

Levy, impose, charge, collect
The one-two punch when child leaves home
Without a home, the heart is haggard
We need belonging to find shalom

Ah, Shalom, you’re so elusive
Particularly when life is knotty
It is so humbling to sit in failure
Without humility, the heart is haughty

Still and still and still again
Hurt and hope, home, humility
When life brings sorrow to our heart
We can find strength in our fragility

There was a little girl,
Who had a little curl,
Right in the middle of her forehead
When she was good,
She was very good indeed,
But when she was bad she was horrid.

~~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

She was cute, although
Her favorite word was NO
She shouted it often and loudly
Her mother sat her down
And said, with quite a frown,
“Daughter, you do NOT do me proudly.

“I know this sounds absurd
But could you choose another word
One without such negative implication?
If you can’t do that for me
I’m afraid that you will be
Quite lonely when we leave you for vacation.”

“NO” formed on her lips
As she planted hands on hips
Then she looked to see her mother really meant it
So she took a deep breath in
(And grinned a little grin)
Saying, “I will do my best to prevent it.”

Such an eloquent little girl!
Complete with little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead
She gave up shouting “NO”
And with sweet face quite aglow
She shouted words that were even more horrid

This is my submission for the W3 Challenge this week. Poet of the Week Violet (Congrats, Violet!) gave me the kind of challenge I love — a story poem. However, I did not follow all her guidelines. Here’s what she said:

Tell a story in verse—true or imagined, rooted in memory or invention. Let it unfold in a place you know well or one you’ve only dreamed of.

You can let the voice guiding the poem speak in a dialect—regional, ancestral, invented, or intimate. Let that voice shape the rhythm, grammar, and soul of the piece. Whether it’s Appalachian twang, Mandarin-inflected English, Nigerian Pidgin, or your grandmother’s Russian-accented Hebrew, the dialect is not a flourish—it is the storyteller.

While this use of dialect is optional, it’s highly recommended. Give us a poem that walks and talks in its own shoes.

I DID tell a story. However, I didn’t use a dialect. Trust me, this is good — my original attempt was to write a poem in Pig Latin.