Watermark

Snapshot Poem| Moon Island

  This week's prompt is Moon Island, which I used for another long-lines exercise. Again, I've done it as an image; click it to bring it up larger.

Below the cut, the poem in text, with broken lines:

Here | snapshot poem

Once again, the lines are too long for the format, so I've done it as an image (click to bring it up larger.) The text, with broken lines, is below the cut:

This week was "a novel prompt": Make a list of 10 or so words - the final words from chapters of a book of your choice - and then write a 10- to 20-line poem using those words.

My words: you, release, today, transformation, asleep, anymore, language, grace, rest, religion, here, palm, from Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia.

I'm also, as you can see, still playing with line lengths.

Raven

  This week's prompt is Birds and Bonds, which I used for another long-lines exercise. Again, I've done it as an image; click it to bring it up larger.

 

Below the cut, the poem in text, with broken lines. Oh, and -- forgot to mention -- I have another Raven poem, which will be published in a book about ravens, soon to come from Rio Nuevo Publishers.

This Is Not Paradise Junction

Here in the North
we turn toward deeper
darkness. Tonight's thin moon

hides itself in clouds
withholding snow. Our stars
are curtained. No light falls

on my skin. It does not
touch me. I cannot
feel it. I lie alone

on this high, hard bed.
Night follows night.
I watch for the moon

out these frosted windows,
listen to the silence
of winter. Trains pass by,

their rattling wheels, their
mournful call, taking someone
somewhere. Where are you?

Do you see this moon
in your strange sky?
Can you name the stars?

 

  This week's prompt was a road sign:

THIS IS NOT
STATE ROUTE 95

snapshot poem 14 november 02007

  The prompt this week is Places.

this room
this cozy domestic room
modeled on the victorian
modeled on the english

with its comfort and its ornament
its signs and sighs of lives &
loves in other lands
the green and yellow paintings

the landscapes the portraits
the blue and white china
the red country toile
bone and silver and ivory

under glass with tattered books
books open on their bellies
backs broken and worn in
worn out

the garden with its curves
with its rocky beds
sleeping now waiting
for winter with its cold wind

this room its french loveseat
its fringed cushions its cats
its lap dogs the round fish bowl
awaiting a new fish a black

goldfish perhaps a moore
appropriately victorian
appropriately modest &
flamboyant at once this room

with its bentwood boxes
memorabilia of another
people the people smothered
slowly murdered by blankets

and all this domesticity this
room with its old woman
its modern conveniences
its four white walls

 

snapshot poem 07 november 02007

the string has broken
i pick up the beads
of my life

they are dissonant
discordant
there is no harmony here

was there ever a pattern?
some have fallen
into the grate

i'll never retrieve them
they are rolling down
a long culvert

it is dark here, unnavigable
i am lost
listen, the beads are rattling

pick up this one, this one
place them on the paper
one, then another.  another.

these words on this page.
one, then another.  another.
was there ever a pattern?

these poems fall through
the grate, they roll down
a long culvert

they rattle against the dark

   

Snapshot Poem 31 Oct '07

the garden
is buried
in leaves

and so
am I

Enjoy your All Hallows Eve --

tomorrow the marathon begins.

Snapshot Poem 24 Oct '07

interminable months of flatness
the borderless continent
of fatigue - compulsion
of blue - dreams
seep into days
like autumn
fog

 

Snapshot Poem 17 October 2007

wind comes
to strip the trees

what was red
& gold is now

sky, clouded,
speckled blue

the cats sleep
all day long

Snapshot Poem 10 October 02007

This day is too gray
for profundity. I woke
to roofers hammering,
shingles flying past
my window; both dogs

quietly asleep, pressed
against my knees.
The birches are a shower
of gold, with a few
withered brown leaves,

holding, holding on.

   

MP3 File