Author: mary

Old Bits Reclaimed

Another start of a poem for the Laieikawai sequence. I wish I could put more order to it but life is not allowing that; I feel accomplished just for getting something workable on paper, if incomplete. And it will be easier to make them all better if I have a them to begin with, yes?

At dusk their skin’s the same
color as mine. Ten minute shower
rolls in: Grandma and I sing
the water down, the swell and surge
…

Sneak Paths

Wikipedia has let me down again, nothing I can link to about electrical sneak paths, which inspired a fairly decent lyric rough draft just now. It just needs an ending, one more solid.

Excerpt:

My future
does not cut cross-grain,
up-river, or against the wind:
I flood the die and solder self
to self.

New Each Night

Perhaps if I were clever I would have revised last night’s tattoos but I have decided I could get nearly 10 new things drafted if I made myself keep looking forward. That’s a lot of Laieikawai retelling. So, first draft of “The Octopus Miracle”. No darlings to share yet, but I have learned that these poems may be alliteration-heavy and alternate first and third person. So. That’s two for two.

Rewrite until Urgent

I have Imbolc as my excuse: time of the year I traditionally try to emphasize my creativity. I have Job 2 travel to awaken the sleeper, as Paul’s father would say.

In the end, it is Robert Fisk that ignites the spark: (page 174) “At least 40 of them were told to prepare themselves for execution by firing squad by writing their names on their right hands and left legs with felt-tip markers; the guards wanted to identify them afterwards and this was difficult when ‘finishing shots’ to the head would make their faces unrecognizable.”

It isn’t done, it isn’t nearly urgent enough and I can’t (yet) get the meter at the ending to work out. But the beginning haunts me.

I'm out of skin.
The black felt marker
from the torturer
is wet with words
unwritten 
...

Name This Poet

Butterly poised on a thistle’s down.
Lend me your wings for a summer’s day.
What care I for a kingly crown?
Butterly poised on a thistle’s down.
When I might wear your gossamer gown
And sit enthroned on an orchid spray.
Butterly poised on a thistle’s down.
Lend me your wings for a summer’s day.

I’ve put the poet’s name in the first comment.

Lured into a Line

I have been bitten by Marissa’s meme (even if I have just now had time to copy):

Give me the title of a poem I’ve never written, and feedback telling me what you liked best about it, and I will tell you any of: the first line, the last line, the thing that made me want to write it, the biggest problem I had while writing it, why it almost never got offered to magazines, the scene that hit the cutting room floor but that I wish I’d been able to salvage, or something else that I want readers to know.

Also, like Marissa, I ask that you don’t comment with stuff you wouldn’t want me to run with. Because I will run.

Ready? Set?

Two Days Too Late

Here’s your Poetry Friday, in some other time zone, or worldview: a beautiful poem by Judith Wright.

In Praise of Marriage

Not till life halved, and parted
one from the other,
did time begin, and knowledge;
sorrow, delight.
Terror of being apart, being lost,
made real the night.
Seeking and finding made
yesterday, now, and tomorrow;
and love was realized first
when those two came together.

So, perilously joined,
lighted in one small room,
we have made all things true.
Out of the I and the you
spreads this field of power,
that all that waits may come,
all possibles be known—
all futures step from their stone
and pasts come into flower.

(I do confess that I think this beauty can happen without marriage and without duality but that does not detract from Wright’s beauty.)

Also, for those of us who insist that poetry is not dead, Wright writes in her foreword to A Human Pattern:

For many years, a notion has been around that poetry is dying, if not dead. It hasn’t died, and unless a dislike generated in school and university days prevails, it won’t die.

But it is certainly in danger, just as the earth itself is in danger, from the philosophies generated by greed. Materialism, positivism, and behaviourism are foes of both poetry and the survival of the earth. They have ruled during my lifetime; but I think they are on the way out.”

Poetry Friday: Night Light

Because today ripened and bloom autumnal chill, and because it is September 11th and I cannot help but think of war, although I do not wish to, I turn to Nancy Willard‘s poem “Night Light”.

This poem appeared in her book Household Tales of Moon and Water. When I was privileged to hear Willard read at the West Chester Poetry Conference a few years ago I forgot to bring along my copy. Instead, I brought her (then) new book up and explained that I had intended to have her sign Household Tales; she generously inscribed her new book thus:

This poem is in quatrains, except for the exceptional ending; I return to it for the repetition and for the thoughts, not the least of which is “its one trick: / it turns into a banana.”

Night Light

The moon is not green cheese.
It is china and stands in this room.
It has a ten-watt bulb and a motto:
Made in Japan.

Whey-faced, doll-faced,
it’s closed as a tooth
and cold as the dead are cold
till I touch the switch.

Then the moon performs
its one trick:
it turns into a banana.
It warms to its subjects,

it draws us into its light,
just as I knew it would
when I gave ten dollars
to the pale clerk

in the store that sold
everything.
She asked, did I have a car?
She shrouded the moon in tissue

and laid it to rest in a box.
The box did not say Moon.
It said This side up.
I tucked my moon into my basket

and bicycled into the world.
By the light of the sun
I could not see the
moon under my sack of apples,

moon under slab of salmon,
moon under clean laundry,
under milk its sister
and bread its brother,

moon under meat.
Now supper is eaten.
Now laundry is folded away.
I shake out the old comforters.

My nine cats find their places
and go on dreaming where they left off.
My son snuggles under the heap.
His father loses his way in a book.

It is time to turn on the moon.
It is time to live by a different light.