Thanks once again to Lisa Hase-Jackson for the prompt that led to today’s poem. I didn’t exactly follow the directions, but poetry likes to break the rules.
Here is the thing: feathers make me sneeze, bless my soul, and tunes without words make no sense at all
to me, unless heard a thousand times, so they storm my senses like flocking birds or a swarm
of locusts upon the land. Yet, when I feel utterly at sea like that, in my extremity I am so much more than ever me.
I’ve not been writing as much as I’d hoped, but I have been reading and listening to poetry, and writing when I can. This is a derangement of a poem by Wordsworth, “On the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway.”
Against the wrong protest, constantly voice your strong torrents: winding, speaking, passing dead hearts, if they be human. And of nature, romance the beautiful peace and plead for rapture’s glance, the traveler given pause at the forest’s head. Seen in bright threat, baffled and thrown, random fields admit the pattern, are lured by false utility and scorn. Who bemoans the change, ruthless and musty, endured by this blighted parish? Blow hope to flowers, early and pure, kept busy in the world of youth, sown in retirement. Schemes assault the rash, secure in the ground of English, naked then, railed away: it is merely the wind, kindled on the project.
We’ve reached the end of Lexington Poetry Month, so here’s my wrap-up post. I wrote a poem all but two days, and double-posted several days when my schedule got a little nutty. All in all, I consider it a pretty successful poetry month.
More than 2,700 poems have been posted at the time of this writing, and there are still a couple hours left! Check out the work of the 183 poets who took part this year at https://lexpomo.com/
Here’s the catfish featured in one of my later poems:
We’ve reached the two-thirds mark in Lexington Poetry Month, so I thought I’d post again here on my own blog. I continue writing daily and posting at the LexPoMo site, and physical therapy has done wonders for my back.
We’ve reached the one-third mark in Lexington Poetry Month, so it’s about time I posted something here on my own blog. I’ve been writing daily and posting at the LexPoMo site, trying to meet an editing deadline, and nursing a nagging back injury that prevents me from sitting more than 20-60 minutes at a stretch (depending on the day).
We’re a third of the way through September and I’ve managed to compose a poem every day so far. Those short poems have done a good job of keeping my head in the game when I don’t have much time to write.
(Sep 9)
Willow is the emo child of the Deciduous family, bangs forever hanging across her face.
While walking on my street – a street that goes nowhere and leads to nothing, just circles around the neighborhood and back on itself – I saw a pair of crew socks in the road like they’d fallen off the roof of a car or been dropped.
Separated, slumped, bedraggled, abandoned – I felt as lost as they appeared and as full of unanswered questions.
August wasn’t a total bust, writing-wise, but I didn’t set any records. I’ve decided it was a fallow period in which my brain rested from writing, though I did a fair amount of reading and tending to domestic matters.
September doesn’t belong to any special writing category that I know of, probably because it’s when a lot of people go back to school. But it is a 30-day month, and thus ripe for some kind of writing challenge. Indeed, a quick search turned up a boatload of September writing challenge prompts, as well as a number of generic 30-day writing challenges that fit.
In the spirit of those challenges, I’ve decided I want to write something each day this month, just to keep myself going. Work and family have demanded a lot of time of late, so I am composing in my head during small, stolen moments and trying to commit the results to memory until I can record them.
Here are the first three days’ efforts, followed by a photo from the garden.
(Sep 1)
This day has been too many weeks long; this morning I thought of a poem, but now it’s gone.
(Sep 2)
Of time and timing
I have lost five poems for every poem I’ve written because they came to me at inopportune moments.
(Sep 3)
Tired and frustrated, I pen short poems that feel like haiku but aren’t: a new American form?
…
And now, the promised garden photo:
Sedum ‘Matrona’ with garlic chives. A bit of salvia ‘Black and Blue’ in the upper right, along with a couple of flies and a goldenrod soldier beetle (Chauliognathus pensylvanicus).
For today’s poem, I picked up the nearest book, turned to page 17, and wrote down the first word, every seventeenth word after that, and the last word. That gave me twenty-two words, which I divided into pairs, each of which provided the first and last word of a line. Poetry by number?
Seventeen
remark on the way we hold
the line, with only perhaps
a faint idea what happened before
but maps were never
for us: they weren’t
something we turned to
I have no answers—I
can only stand here,
doorway agape, while she
prays to every foreign god
I’m the one to make it so
Today was another funeral for someone I know and love. There have been entirely too many of late.
At a loss
who doesn’t want to believe the rain
may be sharing their grief
or recognize in cloud cover
denial reflected a hundredfold
or understand the thunder
shudders at their own pain?
Now that the world has ended, I’m rather disappointed to find that dirty dishes and loose pet hair remain.
The Daily Compost 