The Shadows Dance Upon the Wall (Cento)

And that recurrent dream of years ago, pulling 

lilacs out of the dead lands, mixing

peculiar unthinkable happenstances.

I can’t understand, no I can’t understand.

None of it really happening –

don’t tell me it will be alright.

We trip on melted sidewalks,

boots pounding cobblestones,

until we reach that horizon

& in a moment it came back to me, that scent of wet

when I started having tender thoughts about

being eaten by the earth –

to be the stone that splits the stream of their vision   

with secret inward gleams

in a radiance dimly akin to happiness.

Consumed, consuming, we are consumed.   

The ocean has lost her baby teeth. 
I hear it in the deep heart’s core –

a heart inflamed …  

altered, estranged, disintegrated, lost.

I wish I was heartless to the core! 

But only so an hour,

and then my heart with pleasure fills.

There’s so much I want to tell you ...

When only the moon rages,

light lingering in the sky,
night turns dark and gold;

through the dark robe oft amber rays prevail.

My life held precariously in the seeing,

it did not matter if I believed.

This poem is written in response to three prompts. At Poets and Storytellers United, for the up-coming FridayWritings #124 we are invited to write something using at least three (or all) of these words: consume heartless inflamed peculiar teeth. (Of course I chose all!)

NaPoWriMo asks us to  write a poem that begins with a line from another poem (not necessarily the first one), but then goes elsewhere with it.  The first line of this poem was indeed the one I began with.

The Poem A Day prompt at Poetic Asides is to write 'a maximum poem'  – and, however we interpret that, to 'take it to the max.'  So I decided to do that by taking ALL my lines from other poems (a form known as the cento). I found most  of them in the pieces Knopf Poetry has been sharing with subscribers this April, and wove in a few lines from famous poets of the past.  Sometimes I needed to alter the punctuation, but the words are intact . After all that – hoping the thing makes some kind of surreal sense – it seemed appropriate to turn to Coleridge, poet of weird, hallucinatory visions, for the title. All the poets I took lines from are listed below, in order.

Title: SamuelTaylor Coleridge

Verses:

J.D. McClatchy

T S Eliot

Asha Dutton

Skeeter Davis

Brenda Shaughnessy

Leila Mottley

KB Brookins

Sandra Cisneros,

Michael Ondaatje 

David St. John

Sharon Olds

Tayi Tibble

Gregory Pardlo

Nam Le

Anthony Hecht

JennyJustice

Amy Ludwig VanDerwater

W B Yeats

Kahlil Gibran

Edna St Vincent Millay

John Chizoba Vincent

Robert Frost

William Wordsworth

Michael Dickman 

Dylan Thomas

Charles Simic

Federico Garcia Lorca

John Keats

Frank O’Hara

Jane Hirshfield

I Couldn’t Fall in Love with Aquaman

I wanted to. I expected to.

But the cinema seats were deep 

and soft, and tilted back … and 

there was all this fighting….

(Battle scenes – even underwater –

I always find incredibly boring.

I’m a chick, OK? Not a bloke.)

It was good to see Our Nic,

slim and beautiful as ever

in a role that was ‘different’ for her,

as Aquaman’s mum – great acting

not really required this time, 

although she did all right. I figured

she must have wanted a job

that would bring her home to Oz

(that’s what we Aussies call it)

for a while, and her birth family.

And they shot it just up here

at Hastings Point in the heart 

of our sub-tropics. She’d have known

how beautiful, with what great weather.

Even if Nicole couldn’t keep me awake –

and I’m a fan – you’d think Jason Momoa

would’ve had me glued to the screen.

But no, off I nodded. Afterwards I decided 

it wasn’t a problem of the heart; just that

it was never Aquaman I lusted for –

nor even cheerful, good-natured Jason

(or so he seems to be, in interviews).

No, it was always Khal Drogo, from the first

instant he appeared onscreen in my home telly.

I don’t even go for large, well-muscled men;

I like ‘em lean and hungry, thoughtful, 

and able to make me laugh. Well, usually. 

The Khal shattered every preconception 

I’d acquired in my seven decades of life 

until that moment, and furthermore

turned me young again. Oh, he was 

something else! But he wasn’t there

in that silly Aquaman film.

The NsPoWriMo prompt was to write a poem about, or involving, a superhero. The Poem A Day prompt was to write a '(blank) of the Heart' poem, and/or a 'Heart of the (blank)' poem.

This Poems is a Conflict of Earth and Water

This poem is a conflict, between two 

who should be allies, you’d think –

two who need to live together 

in mutual support, in symbiosis, 

in give and take, ebb and flow, 

in response, adaptation … in balance.

This poem is a conflict between the two.

This poem is earth silting over,

piling up, drying out, earth

being shovelled, rearranged

by hands and machines,

becoming inhospitable to water.

It is earth discharging its garbage –

being made to discharge its garbage –

to crowd and infect water. This poem 

is earth in conflict with water.

This poem is water overflowing –

overflowing the sky in enormous rains;

overflowing the seabed which can

no longer contain it, to bash at the shore

and overwhelm the shore; overflowing

the rivers and streams with violent roaring

to crash over fields, against bridges,

through houses, to inundate the earth …

to change the earth, and the lives

of all those who live on the earth.

This poem is water in conflict with earth.

This poems is a conflict of earth and water.

In fact it is many such conflicts. Some

are the vagaries of Nature, or so we’d

like to think. Some of us like to think them

acts of God. But most are caused by the acts 

of the human race, which depends

on the integrity of earth and water, the way

they act with each other, react with each other.

This poem is the conflict of earth and water,

very much brought about by the conflict

of humanity with its surroundings, its basis, 

its vital support, its only home. This poem is 

a conflict, deadly for us who need earth and water.

The NaPoWriMo prompt is to write about two things fighting which seem unlikely to fight. The Poem A Day prompt is to write 'an earth poem' (today being Earth Day). 

This is written in the Boomerang Metaphors form invented by Hannah Gosselin. (I also decided, for the heck of it, to increase each verse by two lines – escalating the conflict, perhaps.)