Category Archives: Poem

Heart’s Eye, NaPoWriMo 2021, Day 27

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NaPoWriMo’s assignment for today was to find a word in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows and to use it to prompt a poem. I chose the word “vellichor.” Here is its definition:
n. the strange wistfulness of used bookstores, which are somehow infused with the passage of time—filled with thousands of old books you’ll never have time to read, each of which is itself locked in its own era, bound and dated and papered over like an old room the author abandoned years ago, a hidden annex littered with thoughts left just as they were on the day they were captured.

Since I wrote a poem about vellichor just two months ago, I’m reblogging it here.


Heart’s Eye

Who can pass a bookstore door
and fail to note the vellichor
or fail to feel within their heart
the message of a piece of art?
A  poignant poem or pithy quote,
well-loved and thereby learned by rote,
is a means by which we might denote
that part of us that we devote
to what we can’t repudiate—
that part of us that is a gate 
to a special way of seeing—
the heart’s eye of a human being.

 

Here is the link to The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

Here is the link to today’s NaPoWriMo’s prompt.

Moratorium

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Moratorium

I’m waging a campaign against your excesses.
You don’t need more shoes or jewels or dresses.
I’m sending a notice to wherever you shop
that your random purchases just have to stop!

Your profligate spending’s way out of control.
Abstemious behavior should be your new goal.
I abhor that I’m having to start this campaign
and hope that my efforts will not be in vain.

I’m not suggesting that you turn ascetic,
It’s simply that your present life is pathetic.
You buy and you buy and you buy and you buy
’til the Amazon boxes are stacked to the sky.

Then you head to the mall to buy a bit more,
’til your closet is fuller, I swear, than the store!
Now my salary cannot keep up with the strain,
so I must insist, dear, you try to refrain.

To help, I have cancelled your credit cards, then
tackled your charge accounts, closing all ten.
I’ve taken you off my bank account, too.
hoping to try to educate you

to the fact that life’s more than spending and spending.
I hope that my excessive acts will be ending
your own excesses, and that you’ll find
new hobbies to fill your acquisitive mind.

Prompt words today are random, abhor, abstemious, ascetic and campaign.

Mad Poem: NaPoWriMo 2021, Day 26, Parody

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Mad Poem

We’ve been pinned to our homes
for a year, maybe more,
and after a month
it’s turned into a bore.
We’ve stared at computers
or the walls of our rooms,
our social encounters
just tweets, Skypes or Zooms.
We’ve missed our Starbucks,
the beach and the mall.
Our range of diversions
has been nothing at all.
Restaurant after restaurant
called on the phone
has said they were closed
and to leave them alone.
When we called up our friends,
we had nothing to say
for we did the same things
for day after day.
We yearn for the freedom
that will come with a vacc.
It’s not fair that our elders
can get what we lack!

 

My poem was a parody of the Dr. Seuss poem below:

Sad Poem

 

The NaPoWriMo prompt is to write a parody of another poem. 

Our Better: Nature

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Our Better: Nature

Science just can’t help it. It has to interfere,
trying to come up with things that formerly weren’t here:
pesticides and atom bombs, styrofoam and plastic,
genetic engineering and other “cures” more drastic.

Mother Nature chuckles and sends a flood or fire,
a hurricane or drought or backlashes more dire.
We try to get the best of her, but in the end she’ll win.
for though we try to overlook it, she’s the body that we’re in!

When we seek to alter her, we also alter us.
She’s the vehicle we ride in and we can’t get off the bus.
We’re poisoning her lifeblood and littering her skies,
interfering with her cycles in ways that are not wise.

When we overpopulate, she counters with a virus.
Her avalanches bury us, her floods and mudslides mire us.
If we were Nature’s employees, I think that she would fire us,
bemoaning that decision she made to ever hire us.


Two of my usual prompt sites had not published their word by the time I did my prompt poem today so I only used three prompts. This morning they are published so I’m writing a second poem.The Ragtag prompt today is Help and the Word of the Day prompt is science.

Blind Fashion

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Blind Fashion

They were a fashionable couple, noted for their dress,
attired on all occasions with a unique finesse.

She dressed up on work days in a crinoline and sash.
He even wore a coat and tie when taking out the trash.

Her shape was rather pandurate—thinner in the middle
and very broad down by the hips, rather like a fiddle.

His hair  was thin and patchy with many bald spots that
might have gone unnoticed if he had worn a hat.

So, though they dressed for fashion, they didn’t dress for shape.
He should have worn a tam and she should have worn a cape.

 

Photo from Unsplash, used with permission. Prompts today are  pandurate, work and  finesse,

NaPoWriMo 2021, Day 25: Bad Timing

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Bad Timing

On my birthday in July, my true love gave to me
a coupon for a ski trip and a real live Christmas tree.
Chocolates when I’m dieting, sad songs when I am gloomy.
A grand piano, though my new apartment’s not too roomy.
The week that “Save the Animals” appointed me their chair,
he bought me a new winter coat of lynx and llama hair.

He brings home ice cream in the cold, hot cocoa in the summer.
When I broke my tooth, the peanut brittle was a bummer.
Though his gifts are generous, my thanks are often mimed,
for I’m speechless over just how badly all of them are timed!
The reason why we are not wed is so hard to relate.
I had the cake, the rings, the gown. We set the time and date.

The groom showed up and waited as I walked down the aisle.
My wedding dress was finest lace, my undergarments lisle.
I’d planned each detail out with care and left no stone unturned.
Just one detail  left to him–you’d think I would have learned!
For when I went to say “I do” to this  man I adore,
they found our wedding license had lapsed two weeks before!

 

For NaPoWriMo 2021, Day 25, we are to write a poem about a special occasion.

Kissing Frogs

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Kissing Frogs

If you blow on a warty frog, he’ll worship you for life,
and if you are a princess, he might make you his wife.
Of course it won’t be easy with an amphibian beau,
for you’re sure to draw attention everywhere you go.
Although you’ll be very high and he’ll be extremely low,
as you hop along together, he’s bound to find you slow.
He won’t be good at dancing for with that tiny bod on him,
it will be a certainty that some dancer will trod on him.

A certain growth of character is a prerequisite
for any royal daughter to go along with it.
Your kids would be unusual for though a son or daughter
would excel at feats like swimming in the water,
when it came to royal functions, their gooses would be cooked,
for in any ceremony, they’d be overlooked.
So it’s all right to blow on frogs, to kiss them or to carry them,
but if you are a princess, it is best that you don’t marry them!

Prompts for today are blow, worship, warty, prerequisite and growth.

Hopscotch Flunky

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Hopscotch Flunky

When I hop on one foot, I am destined to fall.
Too much scotch and less hop is the cause of it all.
When they said toss the rock, I threw out my ice.
Any shock that I haven’t been asked to play twice?

The dVerse Poets prompt today is to write a poem in anapestic tetrameter

Stopping by Robert Frost on an Early Morning

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Thanks, NaPoWriMo, for making my poem one of the featured poems yesterday.  The NaPoWriMo prompt today  was to write a poem that responds, in some way, to another poem.
I chose “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost. Here is my poem. A link to his original is given below my poem. It is the first and only time, I think, that I’ll get top billing over Robert Frost!

Stopping by Robert Frost on an Early Morning

Whose poem this is I think I know,
yet know not where I’m going to go,
so glad I am that he won’t see
my page fill up with parody.

My next-door neighbors must think it queer
at six o’clock I’m in full gear
here on my perch above the lake,
dispelling darkness, this poem to make.

I jog my mind to try to shake
some fruitful thoughts out, then I take
and peel the gatherings of my  mind
to seek the flesh within the rind.

This creative state lies deep
between consciousness and sleep.
Each day our rendezvous I keep,
then share the poems that I reap.

 

See Robert Frost’s poem HERE.

Cowboy on an Off-White Charger (Prompts and NaPoWriMo 2021 day 22)

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Cowboy on an Off-White Charger

You say I’m queen of your affection, yet your ambit has grown larger.
I hear you’ve put some extra miles on your faithful charger.
You say she is exhausted, her endurance sorely taxed.
She may need reshoeing and your credit card is maxed.

The extent of your travels and the speed with which you charge
have lately increased greatly—to have doubled, by and large.
If our love’s become monotonous, perhaps you seek new favors.
Perhaps you choose to taste delights of various other flavors.

You say your boots are dusty and nonchalantly stroll
out to find a shoeshine boy to cleanse your dirty sole.
Yet what you seek to polish may be a point that’s moot.
I think that what needs polishing may not be a boot.

Prompt words today are dusty boots, monotonous, ambit, speed and queen. The NaPoWriMo prompt today discussed different poetic devices. In lieu of just using one of them, I decided to try to use metonymy, polysemy, synecdoche and metalepsis in one poem. Image by Karen Cantu on Unsplash, used with permission.