Tag Archives: Shape Poem

After 15 Years, for dVerse Poets Apr 25, 2024

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If this poem left justifies, click on it to get it to center as it is a shape poem!

After 15 Years

Your memory                                                     cuts so sharply
through my dream’s beginning that I wake,
gasping like a fish on the sand
left by some fisherman
too intent upon his next catch
to end it cleanly.

In its tight skin,
I gasp for air,
rise as it cannot rise
and like you cannot rise
out to that night sea air
which is the only coolness
in a month of burned days.

My memory, curving round,
pulls in the memory of you
like gills seeking to understand
the waterless air.

Landed by some bigger fisherman
whose bait you couldn’t resist,
“Oh,” you said, just “Oh,”
before you took the hook,
slipping from my grasp
as I held on, held on,
let go.

 

This is one of the poems in my book of 50 years of love poems  titled
If I Were Water and You Were Air, about to be published on Amazon.

Posted in response to the dVerse Poets Open Link Night.
See how others responded to the prompt HERE.

Interlopers, For NaPoWriMo 2024, Day 16

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Interlopers

The little dog sleeps nestled.
No elbow room, even though
just two of us in this big bed.
A truck’s roar  from the road
a mile away. Last night’s near
partiers now gone to bed, but
at 5 AM, the strains of music
from below, Sounds lifting up the mountains
like clouds to float above my bed.
For 15 years, I surrendered
my side of the bed to you.
23 years after, I still
sleep on
the

                                                   other side.

For NaPoWriMo 2024 Day 16

Fallen Woman

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Sam has asked what tree we would choose to be and perhaps this is fudging a bit, but this  is a poem I wrote a few years ago about the tree I am no doubt fated to become:

Fallen Woman

For Sam’s prompt: https://mcouvillion.wordpress.com/2023/01/01/which-tree-would-you-be/

Question and Answer

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Question and Answer

When all our colors fade to white
and night is day and day is night,
and I am you and you are me,
erased for perpetuity,
when spectral is our whole domain,
when death obtrudes, what will remain?

When death obtrudes, what will remain?
When spectral is our whole domain,
and all our colors fade to white,
when night is day and day is night,
we will be one—our you and me
erased for perpetuity.


Prompt words today are perpetuity, erase, spectral, obtrude and white.

Junk Drawer

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This is the prompt:

  • First, find a song with which you are familiar – it could be a favorite song of yours, or one that just evokes memories of your past. Listen to the song and take notes as you do, without overthinking it or worrying about your notes making sense.
  • Next, rifle through the objects in your junk drawer – or wherever you keep loose odds and ends that don’t have a place otherwise. (Mine contains picture-hanging wire, stamps, rubber bands, and two unfinished wooden spoons I started whittling four years ago after taking a spoon-making class). On a separate page from your song-notes page, write about the objects in the drawer, for as long as you care to.
  • Now, bring your two pages of notes together and write a poem that weaves together your ideas and observations from both pages

    Click on the arrow on the album to hear the song.

For NaPoWriMo 2021, Day 10

Shelter in Place

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Screen Shot 2020-04-21 at 1.58.30 PM

The dVerse Poet’s prompt today is the word “flush.” The poem is to be a quadrille—-exactly 44 words, not counting the title.

Early Morning Jazz

15 Replies

If you are viewing in Reader or on facebook, please click on the title or URL to view poem in its correct form.

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                                                      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.

Tailor of Mankind

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     IMG_7739Doll by Judy jdb photo

            Tailor of Mankind

    He thought he would be a tailor of men.
 Then, “Woman!” he thought,
  laughing as he
      extracted a rib, seaming

hills and valleys, taking a subtle tuck
     here, folding an excessive curve there
and there. Smoothing it over, shortening
          a length. Extending another.

      Making them fit and not fit.
  Not a perfect pair but rather
thesis and antithesis,
yin
   and
yang.
   Anima
           and
  Animus
     he shaped into each
               in different quantities.

                    Then, he clothed perfection,
       sheathing it and obscuring
  differences to be discovered
    under falling leaves, in darkness,
          setting a whole world in motion.
                           Then he wept.

The prompt today is tailor.