Tag Archives: literature

Heart’s Eye


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.

Word prompts for today are art, repudiate, vellichor and denote.

Time Temporal (Final Day––Day 30––Of NaPoWriMo)

The prompt on this last day of National Poetry Month is to find a shortish poem that you like, and rewrite each line, replacing each word (or as many words as you can) with words that mean the opposite. I chose Sonnet 18 by Shakespeare.

Time Temporal

by Judy Dykstra-Brown

Shall I contrast thee to a winter’s night?
Thou art less lovely and more tempestuous.
No wind disturbs November’s empty stalks,
Oe’r which the winter hath too long a power.
Sometimes the too-cold moon lies sheathed in clouds.
And rarely does its pitted face shine forth.
Yet light from dark may rise. We’re proof of that,
Spurred on by fate or providence’s  plan.
But thy short winter soon shall pass away,
Restore to thee the homeliness of death.
Nor shall that birth that brought you forth to light
Still claim thee when time curtains you with night.
As men lose breath and eyes  give up their sight,
So dies this poem, and you echo its plight.

Sonnet 18

by William Shakespeare

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to Time thou grow’st.
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.