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