Tag Archives: love

NaPoWriMo Day 11: Strawberry Hill Forever

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Poets have been writing about love and wine, wine and love, since the time of Anacreon, a Greek poet who was rather partial to that subject matter. Anacreontics might be described as a sort of high-falutin’ drinking song. So, today our prompt was to write about wine-and-love.

Strawberry Hill Forever

So take we rum and take we Coke
and sippy-straws so we don’t choke
on ice and limes within our glasses
and fall dead on our tipsy asses.

Let us to Elysian fields
take our drinks and also meals:
cheese and grapes and shepherd’s pie,
potato chips and ham on rye.

Let us frolic in the lee
without your kids—just you and me.
Spread a blanket and have some fun.
Show ourselves to the morning sun.

If perchance you’d prefer wine,
well, you take yours and I’ll take mine.
I’ve chosen well. I think I will
take some Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill

found in a box of college things:
pennants, books and old class rings.
This dinosaur, screw top intact,
we must imbibe, it is a fact,

to stir libidos and memory
so I might take thee on my knee,
cop a feel of thy lovely ass
and roll thee in the green green grass.

Afterwards, we’ll fill our lips
with sandwiches and pie and chips.
No satyr dined on lovelier fare.
No nymph tasted food more rare.

And when the sun falls in the west,
we’ll cork our wine, pack up our chest
and hurry home. We can’t be late.
Your husband’s getting home at eight.

NaPoWriMo Day 7: Fidelity

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Our prompt today was to write a love poem.

Fidelity

Each morning when I wake
to shrill alarm or sweet bird song,
depending upon the requirements of my day,
you are the first to greet my opening eyes.
You rest there on the pillow next to me
in the bed where first I, then you,
have fallen to sleep the night before
too soon, too soon,
before half our words were said.

After a quick trip to the john,
it is the first stroke of my fingers
that bring you finally to life.
Your countenance lights up
and the same love words
I revealed to you last night
are returned to me.

My hands caress
and new words come easily
first to me, then to you.
I touch gently all
your fine smoothness,
getting back
everything that I give
equal measure,
continuing our long love story
of give and take
as I shift your light frame onto my lap
to stroke your separate parts
from question mark to exclamation point.

Could a PC ever rouse this passion in me?
No way, MacBook Air. Thou art my love!

(I forgot to mention before that this love poem was to be written to an inanimate object. My love affair with Macs has extended over 30 years—from my very first floppy disk table model to my new love…the ultralight MacBook air.)

NaPoWriMo Day 5: Two Poems

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For our fifth prompt, we were asked to take a famous poem and use each word, in sequence, as a last word in each of our lines. I chose “In a Station of the Metro” by Ezra Pound.

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.  

Here is my poem:

Dateless Saturday Night

How she worries the
puzzle of her 16 years, her face an apparition
in the mirror of
her window. These
nights with no other faces
in them, no other voices in
them. She sits alone, apart from the
cool crowd,
plucking her own petals,
“He loves me. He loves me not” playing on
her radio, a
hand holding one more piece that doesn’t fit, wet
with her dew, the whole world black
grackles on a leafless bough.

-0-

That was so fun, I did another, this one based on Robert Frost’s “Devotion.”

The heart can think of no devotion
Greater than being shore to the ocean–
Holding the curve of one position,
Counting an endless repetition.

Here is my second poem:

The

Changing “a” to “the”
is something the heart
will not do before it can.
It is not a matter of what we think,
but rather of
how we must. No
“should” can prompt devotion.
Nothing in our small lives is greater
than loving, than
being
loved. In our pursuit of it, we search for the shore
we were born to drift to,
swell towards the
home the ocean
of our being wants for us, holding
our happiness in the
breaker’s last curve.
What we are made of
is this becoming one––
curling from our lonely position
toward our safe harbor, counting
our failures shore after shore with an
aching to find the one. This seeking? It is endless,
and makes our world in its repetition.

Yellow (Day 28 of NaPoWriMo)

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Day 28 The prompt today was to write a poem about a color.

Yellow

You were so red, so white.
So much of you was blue.
Yellow is what I missed in you—
that brilliant optimism—
that power of the sun.
There was that black in you
that cancelled it out.
You were the artist who understood color the most.
That color created by the union of yellow and black, you knew.

Your white hair, confined in a pony tail
or streaming down your back
in your wild man look
prompted strangers to ask
if you were a shaman,
or declare you to be one.

That red that flamed out from your work,
subtly put there even in places where it had no
logical purpose for being.
That red tried to make things right.

All of us who knew you
knew the blue.
It was the background color of all of your days.
It was the blanket in which we wrapped ourselves at night,
trying to be close,
but always always divided
by blue.

For fifteen years,
I believed that one day I’d bring you to yellow.
There were splashes of it, surely,
throughout our lives together.
You on the stage, reading your heart,
me in the audience, recognizing
all the colors from within you—even yellow.

Finding the pictures you had taken of me
at the art show, looking at your work—
those pictures taken even before we ever met.
I discovered, after you’d passed,
that you had recognized
me even then, when I thought
I was the only one
angling for a meeting—
sure of my need to know those secret parts of you
that I will never know
now that you have given yourself
to the black
or blue
or red
or even to the white.

Whatever your ever after
has delivered you to.

A new life later,
I am suffused
by my own canvas
of memories of you—
every other pigment
splashed against
a vivid background
of yellow.

Three Pantuns (Day 15 of NaPoWriMo)

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Today’s assignment was the pantun, which consists of rhymed quatrains (abab), with 8-12 syllables per line. The first two lines of each quatrain aren’t meant to have a formal, logical link to the second two lines, although the two halves of each quatrain are supposed to have an imaginative or imagistic connection.

Here are three I dashed off quickly in an hour, after a too-busy day. It would be nice if there were room for poetry in every day, unfortunately that is not always so. NaPoWriMo gives us that additional shove to make some time for it, even if that time is very short.

She grows exasperated with his love.
See how his fingertips caress her face?
The hand that fits too tightly in the glove
Might chafe from the embrace of even lace.

The coat tossed idly over kitchen chair.
Inside the pocket is a diamond ring.
The branch outside the window stark and bare.
One tries in vain to pay the birds to sing.

The window that is your connection with the world,
when darkness falls, shows only you.
The author writes, his characters’ truths unfurled,
but it is he the readers view.

“Web of Night” April 2 Post

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I’m participating in this program where I’ve taken an oath to write a poem a day.  Here is today’s poem!  I need a website to link to their website, so I’m using the only one I have–this one.  By the end of the month, there will be 30 poems here…

 

Web of Night

We have been talking online for hours
and, as usual, lost track of time.
Now, after his good-bye,
it would be easier to go to bed
than to act on his reminder
that there should be hot water
in my hot tub tonight,
pumped in earlier from the volcanic depths,
left to cool all day.

I am living in sub-tropical Mexico
where things like volcanoes are everyday things.
I drink the volcano.
I swim and soak in it.
I absorb its heat,
draw from its power,
grow stronger.

This is the fountain of youth, I’ve often said.
Too long away from it, I start to grow creaky and old––
reversing those effects only by coming home again
to lie in its steaming bath.

I look up from it now
at a night sky unlike any other––
only the major stars distinct, like light seen through
irregularly perforated steel. The stars standing out individually,
between them the remarkable floss of clouds stretched
sparse as angel hair on a Christmas tree
to reveal the ornaments
between.

No one else awake in this morning hour
so early that it is really still the night before.

2 AM. Neither a dog’s bark nor a burro’s bray.
No harsh staccato though the cool night air
of air brakes of trucks
too wide for the two-lane carretera.
down below.

Alone in my world.

The clouds, while I’ve been thinking blind,
have obscured the stars
behind a thicker web of cotton wool.

I think of love so far away,
wishing it nearer but feeling it close
as the keyboard in the room behind me.
There are many of us
caught in this Web of internet romance.
Here we need not fear
the loss of a love
that is a part of an addiction
to the mystery of absence
yet words so close
they are almost
but not quite
touch.