Tag Archives: poem about writing

Let There be Light

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Sometimes, to get to that authentic part of ourselves where poetry resides, we have to illuminate some dark corners.

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Let There Be Light


My mind is a growling dog.
While I stew and fuss,
fulfilling lists,
she jumps the screen door,
beckoning.
Rude me, to turn my back
on the only playmate
who wants to play
the same games I do
every day, every hour,
because I fear that initial
plodding through silt
page after page
in search of the stream
of words.

Sometimes boredom
yawns so wide
that I have to enter it,
to wander its inner closet
where for decades
only cobwebs
have stirred.
In some dark corner
where I spank the dog
or search the bedside table drawers
of a lover called out at midnight,
I find the river’s source,
but then
the phone
rings and I’m off
gathering crumbs from a forest path,
leaving lost children
stranded in their own story.

Stray puppies—I collect every one,
wild orange funnel flowers
and guava
washed in an afternoon kitchen
just before the invasion
of five o’clock sunlight.
All of them I carry back
to hidden places
to rub against each other
and ignite
into the language of this place
where life goes in,
plays dress-up,
but emerges
nude,
like poetry.

 

If you’ve been following me for four years, you’ve seen this one before. The prompt word today was authentic.

Poet vs. Prosaist: NaPoWriMo 2018, Day 7

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Poet vs. Prosaist

I make the words just snap in line.
The rules of rhyme and meter, mine.
One line suggests the next in time,
limited by theme and rhyme.
I step aside and words rule me.
I love the puzzle of poetry!

Your rhyming games are your excuse.
A form of literary abuse.
Your joking rhymes become the norms
while you eschew more serious forms.
If you would cast your poems aside,
You’d find where deeper thoughts reside.

The prompt today was to list all of your identities, then to divide them into ones that make you feel powerful and vulnerable and to have one identity from each of the different  sides of your personality talk to each other.

Powerful: poet, artist, friend, pet wrangler, swimmer, art collector, traveler, gardener, photographer, driver, girlfriend, teacher, sister, advisor, beloved.

Vulnerable: Stepmother, friend, daughter, widow, wife, senior citizen, kid, dancer, guitar player, singer, sorority girl, hippie, sister-in-law, home owner, prose writer, advisee, student,patient, lover.

 

.http://www.napowrimo.net/day-seven-5/

 

New Faith

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I really started blogging exactly five years ago today, when I wrote my first NaPoWriMo poem, having little faith in my ability to make it for the whole thirty days.

In the end, day-by-day, I did it.  A year later, I did it again and when I came to day 30, I didn’t stop.  Since then I’ve exercised a different sort of faith by writing every morning—doing  a number of writing and photo posts, including at least one poem or story, every day for the past 1,460 days. (This post will be my 4,074th one.)

The pool exercises I once did faithfully in a water aerobics class three mornings a week at the clubhouse pool,  I still do at midnight in my own pool under the stars and moon, surrounded by the blossoms that fall from the tall Washingtonian palm trees that rise like giants in the night air above the pool.

I swim with the moon,
stars strewn like wedding flowers
in this midnight pool.

For dVerse Poets Haibun Monday, Faith.

The Gatherers

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The Gatherers

We gather a new world
every time
as we collect marks
in  black lines
on white paper,
and we have the power
of each world
that we pull around us.

I might have called this poem
“Utter Sovereignty,”
but I did not, for rulers are
sad folks, and lonely.

We are the gatherers and so
we draw to us what we need
and are never alone.
There is nothing we lack for
in this storehouse where
the shelves hold words,
the air is heavy with ideas
and the walls are covered
by imagination.

We gather words to set them free again.
This is the pattern of the world
that no one has ever broken.

Everything flying apart,
every moment of the day,
and all of us
gathering
it back together
again.

 

 

This is a rewrite of a poem written four years ago.  The prompt word today is imagination.

To Get a Poem (5 Quadrilles)

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To Get a Poem

(5 Quadrilles)

Leave the dirty dishes in the sink.
A dishwasher washes the poems away.
Allow cat hair to accumulate on the footstool.
Cat hair is a city for poems.
Let plants go another day before watering,
lest poems in the soil should be flushed away.

Let lie the crumpled sock a friend’s child
left in the sleeping loft.
Don’t destroy the poem of it.
Don’t bother to rake leaves.
Poems cannot live in neat piles.
Leave the soupstain on your shirt .
Tomato and basil are ingredients of poetry.

There is a poem in the confetti of paper on the bedroom carpet
and in the bread crumbs and the orphaned straight pins.
Bills in the “TO BE PAID” folder?
Each is the embryo of a poem.
Paying them now would be poetry murder.

In my living room, there is more poetry
in the blankets of dust on glass tables
than the burnished surface of the clay vase.
There is more poetry, more poetry, more poetry
than can ever be tidied up in this world or the next.

Falling poetry snarls in the weave of the hammock.
All of this raw poetry lies around us, primed for the collecting.
Messy poetry and dusty.
You won’t die from, but you could live on
poetry that’s hidden in the messy corners of your world.

 

For dVerse Poets. The prompt was to write a quadrille on the subject of poetry.

 

A Proclivity to Rhyme

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A Proclivity to Rhyme
(All the Time)

You may guess there are drawbacks to writing as I do,
for lately, I must find a rhyme for everything I view.
This matching up of words that rhyme has come to be compulsion.
A harmless one, but still one sometimes met with some revulsion.

When making jokes or making bread or making whoop-de-do,
I always think of words that rhyme and then I voice a few.
So when a lover bites my neck and with my hair is toying,
and the only word that I can find to rhyme is “cloying;”
it certainly gets in the way of my successful “boying!”

Or when a good friend feeds me and under-cooks the meat,
as I run through my retinue to find a rhyme that’s neat;
and she happens to hear me just as I curse the red,
wishing she had opted for a well-done steak instead,

my sincere protestations do not seem to be accepted.
If only that one choice of rhymes had not been intercepted,
perhaps she would still ask me to her luncheons and her dinners,
Instead, I’ve wound up on her list of culinary sinners!

As much as I like rhyming, sometimes it is a curse,
for what is my best habit may also be my  worse.
If only long ago I’d learned how not to rhyme each word,
the last one in this poem would not need to be “absurd.”

Another very golden oldie that happens to fit the prompt perfectly. The prompt word today is proclivity.

Three Hundred Words in Search Of a Meaning

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15 Minute Timed Writing
(300 Words in Search of a Meaning)

One-a-minute two-a-minute three-a-minute four—
big bad minute police waiting at my door.
If I take a minute more, I know they’ll somehow know.
so thinking about what I say is gonna bring me low!

They’re gonna crash my firewall and take me off to jail.
So with no other bloggers here to get me out on bail,
I’ll get on with my writing. Write about anything—
not about-a-nothing, and the words they gotta sing.

Time is of the essence ‘cause there ain’t no other clue.
Topical-type bloggers won’t know what to do.
Don’t know why with time limits I’m lacking all my grammar.
It’s like my words are nails but that I’m lacking any hammer.

With no topic they all lie here, looking for a wall.
There’s no sense to any of it. No. No sense at all.
I’m sure a question’s out there, but nobody’s gonna ask it,
and all these words just roll on by like eggs without a basket.

Purpose keeps eluding me. I know I’ll never find it.
Somehow though I’m running, I stay too far behind it.
I once said that I never know  what I will be writing.
From line to line, I follow words and hope they’ll be inciting

a thought, a theory or a theme somewhere along the way.
I always hope it will be soon, ‘cause I don’t have all day
to do the kind of writing that I like to do,
for when I look, I see the time—9:15:52!

I know that is impossible. I’m sure that there have been
fewer minutes since I started—only nine or ten!
Yet the clock says fifteen minutes and  seconds more as well.
So though I’ve met the challenge, It seems I’ve missed the bell!!

I drew a blank on today’s prompt so this is a rewrite of a poem from three years ago. The prompt today is theory.

Sound Bites

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dsc07914

Sound Bites

When the daylight takes its bite
eating up the dark of night
I begin my daily rite
of finding all the words to cite
that serve to bring my thoughts to light.

I write and write and write and write–
filling up my blogging site
until my dogs begin to fight,
and finally I know it’s quite
necessary to do what’s right.

And this is when I find I might
secure my laptop lid up tight
and give my brain a small respite.
It is my second day’s delight
for they have tried to be polite

lest they disturb me or incite
words that in my haste are trite.
With  open door, I then invite
their appetites—now at their height.
Each jumps and spins–high as a kite,
and comes to have his morning bite.

 

Eight of us are at a writing retreat in Puerto Vallarta so I’ll soon be doing writing to a different prompt.  In the meantime, this is a  rewrite of a poem written 3 years ago. The prompt today is bite.

Poets and Pundits and Scribes

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Poets and Pundits and Scribes

This particular moment of this particular day
is the only time in which we’re sure to have our say.
Life lived moment to moment is the single choice we have.
For past pains and for future wounds, now is the only salve.
I spread its gift over myself. Its healing unguent lingers.
The world that I make out of it coils out beneath my fingers.
I drift back to my past times, I project to tomorrow.
Times actual and potential are moments that I borrow
to wrap my attitude around to write daily depictions
of what my life consists of—its confessions and its fictions.
We skirt around the details of what we think is actual,
but nothing ever written has been totally factual.
I write what I remember and what I hope will be,
then press it onto paper for perpetuity.



 

Today’s prompt was particular.

Driven: dVerse Poets Open Link Night

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jdbphoto                     

 

Driven

They’re always back there in my head––
the things I could have said instead.
Sometimes not voiced for a reply,
but just existing in my mind’s eye.
Words joined in ranks turn there about
wondering how they’ll get out.
Before they start to riot and rage,
I let them out of their bone cage.

The voices murmur and they chide.
Cause trouble if they’re locked inside.
What if the mad men of this world––
in asylums cruelly hurled––
are simply writers who don’t know it.
Wild voice inside. No place to stow it.
All those entities inside
taught that they must try to hide.

Perhaps if they could let them out
to prance and scamper, whine and shout
on paper––empty, white and thin––
it would be the simplest medicine.
To fill the paper the surest way
to bring tortured voices to light of day.
To join that strange fraternity
Of those who have to speak to see.

What drives us to this room, alone,
our lives austere as any bone?
Is it the voices there inside us,
barely able to abide us,
needing to be wider heard?
To keep them in would be absurd.
I let them out for exhibition.
Free them from their cramped perdition.

And as I drift off into sleep,
I am the company they keep.
I hear their whisperings faint but clear
as they march in ranks from ear to ear.
Words rolling out in countless reams
fill my empty chambers with dreams.
When I awaken, they break their order,
wild to escape this nightly hoarder.

They jostle, elbow, push and squeeze
to make their way onto these keys.
I can barely match their pace
as they stream out, caught in the race
to be the next to flee my head
in their mad stampede to be said.
I don’t control these words, you see.
I am their transport. They drive me.

 

To play along with dVerse Poets, go here: 
https://dversepoets.com/2017/09/07/openlinknight-203/