We who with songs beguile your pilgrimage / And swear that Beauty lives though lilies die, / We Poets of the proud old lineage / Who sing to find your hearts, we know not why ... (James Elroy Flecker)

5.4.25

A Guitar Shaped Like the Moon

 

… or is it a scythe,

the curve like a blade,

for a clean, sharp death 

in the moonlight?


No, I think it must

be as it’s called,

a fine instrument –

for a folk song


or a soft ballad:

moonlight and roses 

(played with just

a hint of frenzy).


I’m no musician

except in words, 

tone-deaf since birth,

yet I crave this


impossible dream,

this sweetly shaped

tune-maker, of so

delicate few strings.


If I could play

a poem on that …

I think it would be

a hymn, or symphony.


It might be enough

that I could then

embrace dying, 

perfection attained.



Note: Not in danger of imminent death, I think. But I am 85, so both death and the limits of attainment come closer.


Written for NaPoWriMo 2025, Day Five.


For image, see Electric guitar (M5-700 MoonSault model) (in Boston's Museum of Fine Arts).

4.4.25

Shelved?


Not all the art I live with hangs on walls.

Much more is in books. Where it rests, 

waits, perhaps even lurks, until the time

I open it. Then it opens me. Some volumes


are thick, heavy, outsize … supersize.

O’Keeffe, Klimt, Warhol’s photography.

The heavy lifters.  Others are long and slim,

like my copy of The Tale of Genji. This is


the Yoshitaka Amano set of paintings.

The tales are told briefly, but each image –

delicate in line, sumptuous in colour –

is matched by words of poetry, of longing.


My son, who knows what I treasure, gave me 

this book (having held it dear on his own 

closest shelves) after he saw my haiku 

to mourn a lover of Genji: the Moonflower girl.


The book lies quiet, inert, secret. Secretive. 

Until, in time, there creeps once again 

a thread of moonlight to touch me: a soft hand,

a gentle whisper… Ah yes. Yes. Ahhh!


























For my haiku to mourn a lover of Genji, see here.


NaPoWriMo resource and prompt: Today’s daily resource is the online exhibitions page of the International Folk Art Museum. I have a particular predilection for folk art, in which the strange and boisterous so often finds itself going hand-in-hand with practical objects of daily use. But the museum also showcases work of other sorts, like 100 Aspects of the Moon, a series of woodblock prints completed by the Japanese artist Taiso Yoshitoshi shortly before his death in 1892.    [One of these was of the character I've called the Moonflower girl, from The Tale of Genji. – RNW]


Last but not least, here’s today’s (optional) prompt. In her poem, “Living with a Painting,” Denise Levertov describes just that. And well, that’s a pretty universal experience, isn’t it? It’s the rare human structure – be it a bedroom, kitchen, dentist’s office, or classroom – that doesn’t have art on its walls, even if it’s only the photos on a calendar. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem about living with a piece of art.


3.4.25

The Poet Enters the Imagination of South Korea*

 

Where the wind mets the water

is a memory of trees, a discussion

of serenity. The Otherlands

are full of moving fruit,

like coloured balls played with

by children, and a tree lying down  

on a bed of clouds. Elsewhere 

there’s a green, leafy print

of a poem in French,

in its centre an open flower 

traced in lines of light.


I am the one who will come

and tell you of all these things.


I am who reminds you, ‘When you go, 

don't forget you carry back magic.'



*Viewing online images from South Korea’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art


The first three lines of the poem appropriate titles of some of the exhibits.


NaPoWriMo Prompt: The poem is meant to answer, 'obliquely', the question of why I am a poet.