Author: mary

On the Road 3 (NaPoWriMary)

I wish I were the kind who could write love poems in wartime because I see their great need. Instead I write war poems in wartime. Tonight, another 20 line piece about running off, lover left, to kill people who have killed people you love. Perhaps if I could address the pointlessness, but I did that in “The Shield of Thetis.”

On the Road 2 (NaPoWriMary)

I’m failing at the write away from home thang. Maybe my Muse stayed home?

I resorted to the Read Write Poem prompt Joanne pointed to about where you come from and I have three lines I like (three pages later) that I can’t get to go anywhere. And some great metaphor. Sigh.

Oh, look, there’s another idea to try. More prose tomorrow, must scribble…

Sucks

Okay, if four words is now the bar :), I’m golden:

Bring the delusions back.
I ache from staring
into what I am, the quick
and soft and limited
which touches cold and limitless.
Wonder conquers fear
but only dreams can bring me sleep.

Also, I updated WordPress, ladies; please let me know if something breaks while you’re posting.

Marina (NaPoWriMary 9)

I started with Joanne’s link to O’Hara, and re-read “The Day Lady Died”, and then randomly looked at all the poems whose first line begin with M and found Pound’s translation of “The Seafarer”. And realized that I wanted to riff on it. So I began:

I sing for myself               words of my own making
to ride out rough times               in rough seas.
The chop and calm               become the same,
the current carries               pain and pleasure
equally away               and equally as fast.

but I am much too tired to keep it up. I want to come back to this one. (This makes the third poem I have swirling that is a translation of an existing poem, all in languages I do not speak.)

NaPoWriSilly

I do not want to write today
said little Peggy Ann McKay.
I have a life, or maybe tunes,
would rather sport and run with loons.
(Bad picture, there,
what do I care?)
I have a tic in my right eye
that makes my meter go awry.
My pencil’s wet, my pen is dry,
alliterations multiply.
My neck is stiff, personas weak,
you’ll hardly miss me when I sneak
some stolen words into my verse.
NaPoWriMo can’t get much worse…

NaPoWriMary 6

I think the last two days’ work has been too serious. Today, at Job 2, Clayton gave me this punchline (which, on another night, could have become a serious poem, and still might):

For a Botanist

Key this leaf.
Monocot? Dicot?
Its time of flowering?
Its neighbors in the field
or wood or coastline of the marsh?
The men who’ve walked
out of the rising sun
(their skin too pale
to know its rays)
have offered me my weight
in millet for these stringy stems
found roadside
as they entered my domain.
Ah, my kingdom…