The Sad Anniversaries

Persephone in the Overworld

They are now at the further

end of the year, those months

when I return to you – months,

others imagine, of darkness. 

They don’t know how, when I’m 

here in the everyday, I might 

yearn for those ghostly passages, 

to connect back deeply to you:

You – who dwell, truly, in the realm

of the dead. So I must come to you, 

revisiting that now familiar underworld 

where those whom we have buried live.

The deep months, when I seem to 

withdraw, to disappear, when I am indeed

communing with shadows – they are the 

sad anniversaries, the times of ending. 

I have adjusted to going back and forth

each year. I do rejoice in the good green

earth, in flowers and the sun. I do

value my living loves, always. And

I watch as they gradually join you

in the tombs of mind and memory ... 

New friends arrive. Children and other 

young things continue appearing yearly.

It is not unpleasant being here, even

in your absence. Nor is it at all unwelcome

when time spins around again to allow me 

to linger once more in your reality, Love.

The NaPoWriMo prompt: write a poem in which the speaker is identified with, or compared to, a character from myth or legend.

The Poem A Day prompt: Write a The End poem and/or write a Beginning poem.

The subtitle makes it clear I'm identifying with Persephone. The difference is that I've had two great loves in my life, both now dead. They died many years apart, but the anniversaries of those deaths are very close. I am wondering if the poem works, with this variation from the Persephone story.  Also, at the end I capitalised Love, to create some ambiguity as to whom I was addressing, perhaps Love itself, and I also wonder if that works.

This is also an appropriate piece to have written on the date of Samhain here in the Southern Hemisphere: the time when the veil grows thin between the living and the dead, a time to remember and honour our dear departed.

Fady Joudah

invented textu.

I Google:

Palestinian-American 

poet and physician.

(Is it Fahdy, Faddy or Faidy?

I decide Fuddy.)

He’s a great poet but 

I’m more coherent.

(A little overflow from previous poem.)

Incandescent / Until Burnt Out

 

Can poetry’s fire flare out? 

If stoked too hard, will it blaze 

too fierce, soar so high

it thins, becomes air?

Or will it re-ignite?

The NaPoWriMo prompt was to choose one of 10 words taken fromTaylor Swift songs and make it the title. I chose 'incandescent.' The Poem A Day prompt was Until Blank: fill in the blank with a word or phrase and make that the title. So I had to use a double title!

Also, I felt for a little while that I was already incapable of writing one more poem, after writing them every day this month. Then I thought to make  that my subject, and to try a textu: a form invented by Fady Joudah in which the only rule is that it must be, including title and spaces, exactly 160 characters, the number allowed in a text message. (It's harder than you might think, to get it exact.)

Deadly

You've caught me dead to rights,

busy cutting out all the dead wood.

Well, look, they’re a dead loss, 

every one of them. They’re dead to me!

You’re dead right – I’m better off

without those old, deadly bad habits!

 

The NaPoWriMo prompt was to write a sijo – one of my favourite forms to play with. I like to write them as three lines and then break those into six. The Poem a Day prompt was to write 'a dead poem.' And suddenly we're very near the end of April! I decided just to have a bit of fun with this one. 

Letting Go of Julian

What is the nature of reality?

As my friend drives us to another town

for ‘TheTrust Fall’ movie that we missed here,

the pollen-heavy miles inflame my eyes.

In a strange, surreal state, I watch the screen

with a hand covering each eye in turn 

(to cut glare, soothe pain) as we all observe 

a far less transient torture, long-term,

likely to be fatal. It’s clear the man 

is not villain but hero. How can we 

save him? It needs all of us to keep on!

Home, I manage to smash a favourite

glass. Upset, I forget Assange – once more

blanking out that we live in the unreal.

[See revised version, posted 3 Juky '24.]

The NaPoWriMo prompt was to write an American sonnet, i.e. more loosely structured than the strict sonnet form. (But I chose to keep 10-syllable lines, though not in iambic pentameter.) 

The Poem A Day prompt was to remix one of our old poems, so I turned Day 3's surreal prose-poem into a sonnet.

The Garden Fairies Protest

This woman – I don’t know! –

at present she’s left us a jungle

within her small back yard. Well, 

we do like to be left some suitably

wild spaces, especially now

when, all around us, foolish folk

allow the wilderness to diminish.

We fear it will all disappear too soon.

But then, we know of old, she’ll get

that kid from over the road to come again,

to prune and pare, to weed widely,

crash through and slash 

all the tall stems and grasses, 

until at last – wanna bet? –

there’ll be nothing much left,

and some of us will be out on our arses.

We’ll be looking for good weedy plots,

with lots of room, lots of thick growth.

Too much neatness makes us needy!

Yes I know, she rents. Has to appease

landlord’s conventional silliness. But still,

must she till every small corner, 

must she cut and cultivate it so fully, so tidily, 

so prettily and politely? Why, why, why, why?

Today NaPoWriMo asks us to use alliteraton, assonance and consonance; while at Poem A Day we are invited to write in the persona of someone or something not oneself.

[Revised version.]

When and Where Was I Happiest?

Let’s see. I  could say, any and every time 

I was near the sea – the magical ocean.

Or when I rose on tiptoe

to sniff deeply of a rose from my father’s

beautifully tended bushes.

Or when the moon shone full and bright

through my bedroom window

and I would stay awake 

to moon over pen and paper, gazing

out at the night sky and making poems. 

It might have been before I was four,

for that was when my dear, kind Nana died.

So much colour and warmth

faded from my life then – the kind

only she could give. That death cost me dear.

All these memories from childhood….

It’s fair, too, to say

that after I fare-welled infancy

to have one of my own, 

I thought I’d won the lottery! (I still do.)

His father’s blue eyes shone with joy.

(The First-born's and mine are green-brown hazel.)

I felt so green, so raw, so unprepared –

but I delved into the mine of my own

good memories to unearth what was needed.

When and where was I happiest?

If it’s a riddle, I give in.

There’s no one answer. Each

of these occasions, and many more,

give me happiness over and over again.

The NaPoWriMo prompt for this day asked us to respond to one of a collection of 'Proust Questions.' I chose the one that is the title of my poem. (What could be nicer than going over one's moments of happiness in memory?)

The Poem A Day prompt is to use homonyms. Explanation: ''A homonym is either (or both) a homograph (word spelled the same with different meanings and possibly different pronunciations) or a homophone (word that is pronounced the same but has different spellings).'

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! And then had to find them in other people's poems: read on!)

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: Samuel Taylor 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