Category Archives: Shape Poems

Early Morning Jazz

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DSC00081IMG_2706

                                                      Early Morning Jazz   


The scrape of your chair.
                     The gentle tap of keys
   as you, rhythmic early riser,
 rouse the day.

I burrow deeper, 
trying to ignore

Icicles
          beating 
           your accompaniment
        as
       
        o
        n
        e
       
        b
        y

        o
        n
        e

     touched
           by
       sunlight,
                   they
               loose
       their    
         h
         o
          l
         d       

      on the
frozen, silent
        night.

Version 2

For the  dVerse Poets Quadrille Challenge.

Scar

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Scar

 

   All bear them                                          as badges of life.
Each marks a wound                               and then a healing.
Like most of life, good                 growing out of the bad,
producing proud new flesh to cover the inevitable
that we all face––the cut, the gore, the severing.
Life is arranged for some reason to complete
pain with healing, one way or the other.
Proud flesh, proud heart–an excess
in us all that needs smoothing.
First pain and then succor,
a generation dying and 
 another one growing. 
Forever scarring 
the family or
  healing 
   it.

For the past year, I keep getting these heart-shaped wounds on my arm. I think they are from the dogs jumping up on me or from wounds won trimming the bougainvillea, but it is amazing how many times they are in a heart shape.  I’d already written this poem before I decided to try to make a concrete poem out of it. As I progressed, it wanted to be a heart.

 

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/scars/

Changing Lines

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Changing Lines

Would passion carry the same voltage
or heartbreak the sting
if from the beginning we knew
that every extreme
brings us a step closer to its opposite?
It is that great pendulum of the I Ching—
that flowing from the yin to yang—
that foretells the fall of great regimes
glorious in their altruism
who, reaching their apex,
must head back again
towards cruel tyranny.

If we’d known this from the start,
each Summer Solstice would become
a day of mourning,
knowing that having reached one summit,
there is no further height to climb to.
And tomorrow, the start of our slow descent
will bring us closer to that other summit
where dark will reign.

Part of the power of youth’s sweet ecstasy
as well as bitter heartbreak is that it seems as though
they’ll last forever.
This is the spice of life.
Its bread comes later,
as we recognize that
everything,
everything                   everything
changes          into its
opposite.

Since today is June 21, today’s prompt was to write about the Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere.

The Daily Post Prompt: Madame X

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Madame X JPEG

 Another day, another challenge.  This time I’ve used the WordPress prompt from
“The Daily Post” which was: “In 300 years, if you were to be named the patron saint
of X, what would you like X to be?”

DSC06784June 2 sunset in Missouri.

Love Stories

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DSC06776

Dim Sum are little love poems shaped like a heart. I challenge every reader
to write one and send it to me! For the fun of it, I made mine into a chain of hearts.

Morning Metaphor
When you rise hours early
to stand in front of the window
and watch for the UPS truck,
I shift my dreaming over
to your warm pillow.
If you are a child,
I am a
cat.
The Computer
has become the new hearth
and heart of our home, now
glowing out in the darkness
long after we have moved
to the room next door
to try to sleep
in vain.
A Clock
on the wall of every room
speaks its midnight language
and intrudes into my dreams,
each one telling me I am
another hour closer
to leaving
you.