I’m haunted now by longing, as I age –
the remembered longings of youthful loves –
like an old book, where I turn to a page
back near the beginning, to see if it moves
my spirit now as then. Such treasure troves
of beauty and sorrow I hold within!
Yet why, after so long, do they return
to haunt me? I’d resolved to relegate
all to burial chambers. But they burn,
those old flames, flaring ... as the hour grows late.
[Revised 25 June 20204. Earlier draft posted 19 April 2024.]
A dizain.
But I don’t feel like laughing, and I’ve no tales to tell
tall enough to top the reality of our world right now.
Once upon a time a species on this planet grew too fast,
too large. Dinosaurs? No, us: breeding and breeding.
You’ve seen it with other animals. Overcrowding
leads to aggression, fights to the death.
Sometimes earth creates plague, or famine, to interrupt
burgeoning numbers. Sometimes that’s not enough.
This species became so big it blotted out the sun. Or
perhaps it was the opposite? Anyway, climate changed.
A sudden plague wiped out millions …
still didn’t quite do the job. New wars began –
though most of us knew this was not the way home
to a safe place, living in balance with nature.
What price revolution, if it uses
the same old weapons? Yet –
what price change, if gentle means slow?
We fight for breath. The trap closes.
[Revised 24 June – 23 July 2024. Earlier draft posted 12 April 2024.]
(Wuthering Heights remembered)
Little rich girl
forbidden passion
wild-hearted orphan boy
the savage moors.
Respectable marriage
dull but wealthy
life inside walls.
Lover
married for revenge
hating his wife.
Surly. Tyrannical.
How did Cathy die?
How do I not
remember?
The story begins and ends
with her ghost,
crying through the window
to be let in.
Unheard
by the man who lost her –
for all his fierce desire.
Alone, sobbing,
begging her wandering spirit,
please come in
come back to him.
(I understand
that longing
for one dead.)
[Revised 18-19 June 2024. Earlier draft posted 2 April 2024.]
As I grow
the cage of time
shrinks. My years
expand, filling it.
More and more
the walls close in.
The only window
obscured by a blind,
my little view
is dim, shadowy,
larger vistas
unknown.
In youth, breathing deep
I spread like the branches
of a cedar, yet
with room to spare –
unaware then
of restraining walls.
Present reality
pierces:
a sword.
Almost
I impale myself …
but, pausing
I glimpse
from the corner of my eye
a jester playing a flute.
His song hints
that time
might be fluid.
What if the walls
are frail, soft
not fixed – if
stepping through
I find that time
is an ocean?
[Revised 11 June 2024. Earlier draft posted 1 April 2024.]
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.)
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
Jenny Justice
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