Tag Archives: dVerse Poets

Check List for a Budding Poet

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Check List for a Budding Poet

If you want to be prolific,
better that you be specific,
and when you choose to state each fact,
try to make each word exact.
Don’t use time-worn words or wilted.
Avoid pretentious words or stilted.

Never try to force a rhyme.
Do not fail to take the time
to make your lines scan smoothly for,
uneven meter is a bore.
Words written for effect are hollow,
but where heart is, the head will follow.

So write your poetry from the heart.
Put your horse before the cart
and let it pull you up the hill.
Let your words express their will—
you following blindly, just to see
what the next line wants to be.

Let words of different shapes and sizes
furnish pleasure and surprises.
Make your poems resemble zoos
of striped okapis and kangaroos.
Delight yourself and then your reader.
Follow words, then be their leader

by whipping them in line and order,
shaping them within your border.
It never is too late to change
an errant line that’s out of range,
but editing is not what you
initially should seek to do.

Words give hearts tongues to share their pleasure
and their pain in equal measure.
Essayists and authors strive
to make their writings come alive.
They show us where their minds have been,
but poets put the music in.

 

For dVerse Poets “List Poem” Prompt

Feast and Famine

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                     Feast and Famine

 

More is less,
I have heard.
I take another bite of chocolate,
starting more of me.
I keep getting fatter,
tasting delicious
love in my cheeks,
on my tongue.

It nibbles at my teeth.
My dental bills send my dentist to Singapore.
I floss more between my teeth.
I don’t listen
when other people discuss their diets.

It is painful
filling cavities with food.
It gets hard to sit in theaters,
my stomach pressing against my chest.
People ask if I am pregnant.
I say yes.
I am giving birth to more of me.

Meanwhile, I’m a good listener.
People eat my ears up,
take big chunks of them.
I can grow more.
Right now,
this third croissant
is going to my ear.
The next will grow me
more tongue, bigger lips.
When you notice and inquire,
I’m going to tell you stories
that will wind around your skinny waist
like snakes or punk belts,
coil over coil.

This mouth has blistered
in the sun of Africa
in countries now starving.
Well, they were even starving then.
And children sat very close
and learned the words I pointed to.
In the market,
women taught the words
that my mouth needed
to buy their goods.
This is what I bought
in Bati market
on those three hills
where the desert caravans
would wind,
where the high black breasts jutted,
where the scarred faces sought beauty.

In the red dryness,
I bought a silver beaded marriage necklace for myself.
An old woman offered it.
I thought she had done with it, it was such a bargain.
Years later, looking through my photographs,
I saw my necklace on the neck of a young girl––
her bride price purchased for ten dollars.
I never wear it.
It is so beautiful
and I am growing larger
to feel more ashamed.

I bought also:
lemons, string and wooden beads,
embroidered strips to make a belt of,
Lalibela crosses out of brass,
Shawls as thin as gauze,
a bride dress to be packed away,
camel dung chips for my fire.

On the dead television
in the other room,
some nights they show worlds
that are not strange to me.
Things haven’t changed that much,
 though fewer die now than back then.
I’m not insensitive. I send money
I send money
I send money
but it’s never enough.
What I want to send back
is the necklace.

Too late. That young girl is dead,
buried in a woman forty years older.
I eat for her grandchildren.
I imagine their bellies
swelling with the food I eat for them.
I can hardly ever eat enough.

 

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Picture taken at Bati Market, Ethiopia, 1973

 

For the dVerse Poets challengeto write about some hidden part of ourselves–something we would ordinarily not talk about.

Pied Beauty II

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apple pie!!

I wrote this “Apple” poem as a  parody of Gerald Manley Hopkins’ poem “Pied Beauty.” His poem is below mine…

Pied Beauty II

Thanks be to Sara Lee for appled things—
For pies, for apple fritters and for thin-rolled strudel crust;
For pastries of the fruit of Eve and sauce it swims within;
Fresh-cooked in ovens, how their sweet juice sings;
The sugar clotted and pierced— place it on plate we must;
And all taste, for how can tackling it be such a sin?

All things made of flour and Crisco and of apples sweet;
(How can they by nutritionists be so sorely cussed
With words professing they won’t make us thin?)
With their tart flavor are sure our lips to meet;
And meet again.

—Judy Dykstra-Brown

And now, the original:

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

–Gerard Manley Hopkins

The dVerse Poetsprompt today is apples.

An Open Letter to the N.Y. Times Regarding Their Sunday Crossword

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An Open Letter to the N.Y. Times Regarding Their Sunday Crossword

Your circular riddle’s an impossible pill
to swallow. Your blanks I struggle to fill.
The crux of the matter? I never know
just how to harvest the seeds that you sow.
I find your clues exceedingly queer.
Your genius outreaches my talent, I fear.

 

Prompt words today are circular, riddle, outreach and crux. I’m also answering the dVerse Poet’s Quadrille Challenge making use of the word fill in a 44-word poem.
Here’s the dVerse prompt: https://dversepoets.com/2020/02/10/quadrille-97-filling-the-page/

Lost World

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Lost World

There is no skin for our ceiling.
No skin.
The moon, like an animal, 
hovers over and around our houses.

In their caves, twitching iguanas live their small deaths
while, caught by moonlight, my friends go sleepless.
I follow my heart in circles, mutter protests to the stars,
running first against, then with
the incredible crocodile.

There is no skin–not any–for the ordinary world.
The dead in their graves are still for a very long time.
Then they rise to pass again around the circle.
The children are easily sleeping.
Tomorrow they will question the old women
with the candor that is necessary
to rub the callouses from their souls.

Straining to the song of life which calls,
“Awaken. Awaken,”
the mouths of the rising dead eat the steaming earth
and under them, in the earth,
are layers of the innocent
with the hearts of dead flowers
because they have neither the fragrance of life,
nor the beat of it.

When they were alive, they
spilled coins from their purses
and from their mouths, spilled prayers for their recent sins.
All of them balanced the two sides of sadness–
the sadness of seeing, and the sadness of not seeing.

At the time of death, all wash themselves clean of their friends.
And God, the rider through life––
through all things holy as well as all things evil––
hovers near the ceiling
while the refugees shake their brothers,
like water, from their hair.

This God,
who in life took passage in an ordinary boat,
who left his resurrection like a butterfly disappearing,
now travels with light,
words like new flowers on his tongue,
Whispering, “Now. Wake up.”

A sentry walks the escarpment of the reservoir–
an angel who grew up in the trench of the soldier
and the boat of the apostle––
an angel with the teeth of a serpent
who sings all night,
his beautiful face lifted to the violent sky.
“Where are the hands of my mother?”

There is no skin for his ceiling. 
No skin. No skin.
The aqua sky?
Gone, my friends,
replaced by fire.
No skin left for our world.

We are caught in a too-long day
that fades into inevitable night.
We lie awake,
our minds throbbing to music
from the drum of the moon
that leads us into dreams

where we forget the large lie
and remember, finally, that
the sins of the heart
are not just
theater.

 

for dVerse Poets open link night

King Neptune’s Joust

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Image by Daniels Joffe on Unsplash, used with permission

King Neptune’s Joust

Who seeks to best the ocean’s roar 
is just a fool, and no more—
delusional right to his core.
The protection of the knights of yore—
that plaited metal that they wore—
was but a many-chambered door 
that led them to the ocean’s floor.

For the dVerse Poets Quadrille Challenge: Roar. 

Venus in the Year 2020

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Venus in the Year 2020

She is in us, this woman with a skull face
and feathers for hair.

She rises over the bones of her past
with a slow shield
and a fast axe.

From the crest of her walking stick,
hair streams in the wind
as though head and staff
have traded adornment.

She has painted detachment on her face
and tucked emotions under a skin cloak
shredded by the teeth of her life.

She wears her seeds
wound around her long throat,
streaming down her front
to end in a pendant
made from bones
whose stories
only she
knows.

Behind her and beside her,
the skeletons of her memories
and riches
in hide pouches.

With few secrets left,
she stands sentinel
on the mountain.
If she could fly?
She has plucked
her wings
for ornament.

She
stands.

 

For dVerse Poets Open Link Night.

Respite

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Respite

Although it is the day lit world that shouts at me, it seems
that when darkness closes, you echo in my dreams.

 

For dVerse Poets: Echo

Monument

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Monument

A cow is screaming across the arroyo. Fireworks explode in honor of whatever saint’s day is being celebrated this week, drowning out her loud shrieking bellows. It is twelve hours later that someone finds the cow, her horns caught in the wire fence. Too late to save her, they do the kind thing and a single shot rings out. When her owner leaves her for the buzzards, a stench settles over the neighborhood, and we pay a man to cover her in quicklime. It is months later that someone ventures up to find a perfect effigy of the cow—jaws open in her last cries of agony. In mistaking concrete for quicklime, the man we paid to do away with her has instead constructed her monument. Immortalized on that mountain where few others will ever see her, I often see her in my dreams.

For dVerse Poets, we were to write a story of 144 words or less that made use of the line about the screaming cow above. You can read the stories others wrote on the topic by hitting the dVerse link above. This one is exactly 144 words. True story, by the way.

Seaside Soliloquy

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Seaside Soliloquy

Out beyond the breakers, you curl and curl and curl,
until you reach that breaking place where you start to unfurl.
Then you slap your underbelly on the sand’s soft lap.
Clap!
Before sneaking back and under, rolling back out there,
past a reef of coral, without a human care,
free again,
’til you begin
to curl and curl and curl.

 

For dVerse Poets, Apostrophe  (Apostrophe is a poetic device in which you address an inanimate object, animal or a person not present.)