The prompt was to write a poem in the style of a personal ad.
Wanted:
It’s not so hard to write a personal ad.
Wanted: someone to replace my dad
who consents to cut the carrots and grate the cheese
Just exactly as I please.
A quirky, pleasant, intelligent, liberal man
who can navigate a day without a plan;
who will throw the dog a bone
and let me be alone
sometimes. At other times, who’ll draw me out.
Someone who doesn’t even want to shout.
Someone who will make me want to be
We.
NaPoWriMo Day 16 Prompt: Write a “translation” of a poem written in a language you don’t actually know . . . (and try not to peek too much at the translation). Now, use the sound and shape of the words and lines to guide you, without worrying too much about whether your translation makes sense. (In my case, I didn’t look at all at the translation until after I’d written my poem. I wrote a translation of each line according to my intuition, then edited, trying to stay close to the original thread of the idea. My original was in Italian—a language I do not know.) Since I speak a bit of Spanish, there were three or four words whose meaning I could guess at, even though most of these guesses were found to be incorrect; nonetheless, they sped me on my way. I love getting to the part of my mind where something other than myself guides me, even though I hold the reins all the way–especially during the editing.
The poem I chose:
SPIAGGIA SETTEMBRE DEL ’64, by Gabriele Frasca (Link to that poem and its translation.)
The poem I wrote:
ESCAPE
Your life catches in its static house.
Nothing but the lightest footfall betrays its presence.
The door to the greatest house of all, the ocean’s edge,
tempts you to leave yourself and enter.
This echo of the ocean is the dove in you
that carries the message that you want to fly.
Motionless dove, I want to ride on your back
to the crack of sunrise—to its flower.
Forget your lone compulsions.
Leave your comfort.
Desert the logic that has frozen you.
If you could let this sick time pass,
you might grow less diverted as your distance from it grows.
Time’s ricochet might drive you to the canyon’s rim,
revealing to you that you no longer want to fall.
The stress of guilt slows down and if you choose to let it, falls behind.
Time will devour your past no matter how grand its scale––
revoke the sentence and set the guilty free.
You will pass and repass it on your round journey,
until your father, his wife, and your recalcitrance
finally wear away.
April 16, 2013, Judy Dykstra-Brown
Today’s assignment was the pantun, which consists of rhymed quatrains (abab), with 8-12 syllables per line. The first two lines of each quatrain aren’t meant to have a formal, logical link to the second two lines, although the two halves of each quatrain are supposed to have an imaginative or imagistic connection.
Here are three I dashed off quickly in an hour, after a too-busy day. It would be nice if there were room for poetry in every day, unfortunately that is not always so. NaPoWriMo gives us that additional shove to make some time for it, even if that time is very short.
She grows exasperated with his love.
See how his fingertips caress her face?
The hand that fits too tightly in the glove
Might chafe from the embrace of even lace.
The coat tossed idly over kitchen chair.
Inside the pocket is a diamond ring.
The branch outside the window stark and bare.
One tries in vain to pay the birds to sing.
The window that is your connection with the world,
when darkness falls, shows only you.
The author writes, his characters’ truths unfurled,
but it is he the readers view.
“An un-love poem isn’t a poem of hate, exactly — that might be a bit too shrill or boring. It’s more like a poem of sarcastic dislike. “
The Ways I Do Not Love You
I do not want to count the ways I do not love you.
To do so casts me too solidly in your image
without your excuses
for doing what you did:
that you were crazy-jealous,
crazy-in love, crazy-in rejection,
crazy period.
I had always wanted to be loved to distraction,
but being loved to craziness is another thing:
your deep truck tracks carving artless Nazca lines
into the fresh sod of my yard,
the new mailbox snapped off at its base,
the queries from strangers who had met you in a bar
and heard all of the intimate details
of your insane version of our love affair.
The letters to every member of the school board,
every administrator in the district, every lawyer,
every preacher in our town of 50,000,
telling of the wild schoolteacher
and outing her gay friends.
I do not want to count the ways
you proved the heartbreak
of your love for me,
those ways that now delineate
the ways I do not love you.
I do not even love the memory of you
at Vedauwoo, standing on the monolithic rock,
your sun-shy son crouched in its shade.
I do not love the memory
of driving to Jackson Hole,
the twelve-foot-high banks of snow
on either side of the highway
that made it impossible to slide off the road.
The dark, split by our headlights,
pixelated by the mesmerizing onslaught of snow;
and suddenly, the miraculous glimpse of the giant elk
arcing from the left hand snow mass, high above us, over to the bank on the other side,
leaving us spellbound and mute,
as though this was a miracle
neither of us had the words to describe.
What are you, about 21? You asked
that first night at the Ramada.
The music was starting
and I thought you were there to ask me for a dance.
When I answered 26, you smiled that crooked smile
and walked away.
That unpredictable mystery of you
was what kept me intrigued.
I never could stand the ordinary.
Not that I love the memory of this.
And not that I know how long the list would be
of why I do not love you any more.
My mind wanders through the memory of you
like a lazy woman picking chocolates:
testing one and discarding it.
Choosing another.
Finally deciding
perhaps it is the brand of chocolates
that does not suit.
Oh, my once-darling,
I despise the thought of you.
Even these intrusive memories
cannot win me back.
You told me once, “Babe, you are so good
that you don’t even realize your powers.”
You’d lost your job and most of your friends
and blamed it all on me.
Even your friends had chosen my side, you said,
blaming me when I didn’t even know there was a game,
let alone its rules or its consequences.
I do not want to number all the ways
I do not love you anymore.
Suffice it to say that once over,
love might as well have never been.
Like a snowflake on a sun-warmed sidewalk,
there is no evidence
of its ever having existed.
Better to exhaust one’s efforts on a new love,
for there is no way to list the ways you do not love.
No way to bring to light now that list
that you have never written.
That list.
That list that you keep hidden
in the back of your heart
with all of your life’s other
impossibilities.
I’m participating in this program where I’ve taken an oath to write a poem a day. Here is today’s poem! I need a website to link to their website, so I’m using the only one I have–this one. By the end of the month, there will be 30 poems here…
Web of Night
We have been talking online for hours
and, as usual, lost track of time.
Now, after his good-bye,
it would be easier to go to bed
than to act on his reminder
that there should be hot water
in my hot tub tonight,
pumped in earlier from the volcanic depths,
left to cool all day.
I am living in sub-tropical Mexico
where things like volcanoes are everyday things.
I drink the volcano.
I swim and soak in it.
I absorb its heat,
draw from its power,
grow stronger.
This is the fountain of youth, I’ve often said.
Too long away from it, I start to grow creaky and old––
reversing those effects only by coming home again
to lie in its steaming bath.
I look up from it now
at a night sky unlike any other––
only the major stars distinct, like light seen through
irregularly perforated steel. The stars standing out individually,
between them the remarkable floss of clouds stretched
sparse as angel hair on a Christmas tree
to reveal the ornaments
between.
No one else awake in this morning hour
so early that it is really still the night before.
2 AM. Neither a dog’s bark nor a burro’s bray.
No harsh staccato though the cool night air
of air brakes of trucks
too wide for the two-lane carretera.
down below.
Alone in my world.
The clouds, while I’ve been thinking blind,
have obscured the stars
behind a thicker web of cotton wool.
I think of love so far away,
wishing it nearer but feeling it close
as the keyboard in the room behind me.
There are many of us
caught in this Web of internet romance.
Here we need not fear
the loss of a love
that is a part of an addiction
to the mystery of absence
yet words so close
they are almost
but not quite
touch.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 