Category Archives: Poem

“Words” for dVerse Poets

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                                                       Artist: Catrin Welz-Stein.

Words

By their adjustment,
I change their drift,
but when I alter their lilt,
I am as transformed by them
as they are by me.

I am inebriated by words.
I reel in their power
as they call my bluff.

They reflect the changes in me
I would otherwise not know.
I can float in their buoyant comfort
or shoot the rapids of emotion.

Words are my river and my raft,
my cushion and that daredevil conveyance
into a new stream of thought

from which I never return
to the exact same world
I left from

for dVerse Poets
To read other poems written to this prompt, go HERE.

Pre-Textos Del Solsticio

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This is an international show, this year occurring in Tabasco, Mexico. Poets are asked to send two poems and the poems are given to artists who paint a canvas inspired by them. Very anxious to see what my poems yield. Links to the poems I submitted are below. A poem inspired by a painting is called an ekphrastic poem. I don’t know what the reverse is called!

 

The Place

 

NaPoWriMo 2017, Day 16: What I Do with Love Letters

 

Within, for MVB Prompt “Unnoticed,” June 3, 2024

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Within

External episodes are thrilling
but may not be half so chilling
as other splendors that reside
within ourselves—so deep inside
that they may be unmapable
because they are not palpable
to anyone except ourselves.
They’re mysteries that science delves
by means of psychotherapy.
They seek the treasures that may be
hidden in us, but so deep
we think they’re secrets that we keep.
It’s where we go in poetry—
exploring places we can’t see
unless we voice them lingually.

Prompt words are splendour, episode, chilling, palpable and external.

For MVB Prompt: unnoticed

Night Chorus

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Night Chorus

When a bright full moon escapes the cloud,
the dogs howl long and the dogs howl loud.
A burro brays its harsh assent
as wind whipped palms whisper consent.
Only you and I stay silent still
As the world around us speaks our will.

 

 

For dVerse Poets, the theme is Dark and the form is the Quadrille (44 words only.)

“Final Payment” for The Sunday Whirl Wordle 656

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Image by Vitaly Taranov on Unsplash

Final Payment

Bees hum and die in brambles, hidden from our sight, 
and scrawled across the sky, untethered in their flight,
are birds swept by a tempest, urged on by its blast,
as down below, the earth cracks, and our future’s cast
in hurricanes and fires and climate change so vast 
that mankind’s ancient rituals no longer work their magic.
Our cut-down trampled forestlands foretell a future tragic.
We leap ahead to our own end, speed it on its way,
waiting for that reckoning for which we’ll have to pay.

For The Sunday Whirl the prompt words are: trample crack swept untethered hum urge scrawled bees sky ritual leap brambles

 

Why I Write, for dVerse Poets, May 24, 2024

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Why I Write

I write for the same reason
that blue is blue and red is red.
I write because that is what I am.

Words are my sport
and my art
and my discipline.
My bones are words
and so is my flesh.

I am held together
by an understanding
I would never have found
if I didn’t write.
Words are the road I am choosing to take
to become who I will one day be.
Who I want to be.
Who I am intended to be
if there is any purpose in our universe.

Words wed us to our creator.
When I write,
I talk to a part of myself
that is united with the whole
and I become wiser in my everyday life.

Words are how I bring my dreams into reality
by creating a pathway between the two.
Words are the power I have
over the greatest things that I am subject to.
They are the only part of me that no one can take away.

In times of danger, they become thoughts.
In times of safety,
they venture again onto the page.

I write because it is what weds me to a past
I have been long divorced from.
I write because it shows me a path into the future.
I write because it is through writing that I become my best self.

I write to show my fear,
my admiration,
my love,
my revulsion.
It is like a bleeding,
getting these words out––
like a forced birth.

I write because it is the only thing I’ve ever found
that I have felt I am meant to do.
If I am a fish,
words are my water.
If I am a bird,
they are my sky.

For dVerse Poets May 24, 2024 Open Link Night

Elegy for Eunice: Mono No Aware, For dVerse Poets 5/20/24

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When I was little, life seemed like one long summer day.

Elegy for Eunice

Most who might have mourned her
have followed or preceded her to dust.
Those few who still do,
think of her less often every year.
It is only in the fleeting moments
when beauty she might have appreciated
crosses our vision
or a song she once favored is heard
that a sweet pang of missing her
stabs into our busyness
and we remember
how she guided our footsteps,
taught us a gentle way with animals,
prodded us to attain more
and let us go.
This is an elegy to one we have forgotten
too easily and too soon.
One that calls her back to mind,
restores her to her rightful place.

The dVerse Poets prompt today is to write a haibun making use of mono no aware—the beauty of transience. My post is not a haibun, but I hope it meets the rest of the prompt. You can see how others responded to the prompt HERE.

Mono no aware is not simply a morbid attitude toward impermanence. Rather, it is accepting “the beauty of passing things.” As such, Mono no aware lies at the heart of Japanese poetry. Basho, the progenitor of the haibun, exemplifies mono no aware in an excerpt from his “Narrow Road to the Interior” that you can read on the dVerse Poets prompt above.

“Sunday School” for The Sunday Whirl Wordle 655, May 19, 2024

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Sunday School 

Memories dancing through my mind
sing lyrics of the hopeful kind—
church on Sunday, exultation
of a once-united nation.
Loud amens expressing hope,
unheedful of that misanthrope
squirreling away those nuts
of “ifs” and “whens” and “ands” and “buts.”
Forgetting brotherhood’s kind needs.
Choking peace lilies with weeds.
“Make American Great Again!”
expressed with a malevolent grin.
White-robed zealots burning crosses,
Proud Boys complaining of losses
promulgate a hateful nation
fearful of miscegenation.
Ladies sipping afternoon tea,
if you still have hopes for liberty,
rise up against that chanting mass,
hateful, vile-filled and crass.
They are the very anti-thesis
to those lessons taught by Jesus
back when we were innocent,
believing truth was heaven-sent.

 

Prompt words for The Sunday Whirl Wordle are: forget church dancers tea robes weed sing exultation hope squirrel nuts amen. Image by Ben White on Unsplash

A Whiff, For SOCS, May 18, 2024

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A Whiff

What’s that smell
that spray can’t quell?
Smells a bit
like puppy shit,
but never fear,
no puppies here.
It comes alone
from Mom’s cologne.
Efforts relentless
to turn her scentless?
Those ends we sought
have turned to naught.
Each day or two?
A new pee-yew!!!!

 

Without a doubt, the absolute worst perfume ever invented on Earth was Ben Hur. Guaranteed to empty a room the minute its wearer entered!

 

For SOCS: What’s that smell? For this challenge we had to write stream of consciousness with no editing….Phew.

 

One No Trump for dVerse Poets, May 17, 2024

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 One No Trump

I must begin this sad narration

with these words of sad regret

for the state of our lost nation

 that has lost that noble way

carefully  planned in its gestation,

perfect in its founders’ minds,

but somehow skewed in maturation

by takeovers from the Trumpster set

 led by an idiot’s vain oration!

The dVerse Poets Magic 9 prompt today was to write *a poem in 9 lines
*meter and line-length at discretion of poet
*rhyme, a b a c a d a b a, with c and d unrhymed

Go HERE to read other poems that followed the propt.