I’ve been rather lazy poetically speaking these past few months. Perhaps National Poetry Month can help to dislodge me from this lethargy. To celebrate, I’m contributing one Haiku per day throughout April.
Why not do the same?
Tag: Poetry
More NaHaWriMo 2018
More Haiku, or my attempt at the same, for National Haiku Writing Month, 2018!
Day 10
Kelly Belmonte,
thanks for the haiku advice.
It’s been most helpful!
Day 11
Watch the sky, squinting
against her lonely brilliance –
pants dying winter.
Day 12
I never could have
foreseen today unfolding
quite the way it did.
Day 13
“It’s only ten bucks,”
he said, through unseeing eyes.
“Why not get a job?”
Day 14 (Ash Wednesday)
One swipe of a thumb,
marking our humanity.
Momento mori.
Day 15
Let’s shoot our children.
And before their blood is dry,
we’ll do it again.
Day 16
Dark and deep the ground
that suffocates our children
and steals our future.
NaHaWriMo, 2018
A friend and fellow poet, Kelly Belmonte, whose blog I follow hungrily, alerted me to the fact that February is National Haiku Writing Month.
I’m not as adept at small form poetry as Kelly and others. Nevertheless, it is the perfect form to perfect form. An excellent poetry muscle-building exercise if ever there was one! So, always up for a challenge (more honestly, something to get me out of writer’s lethargy!), I here submit my pieces for the month so far.
Day 1
Five, seven, and five.
The perfect form for Haiku.
That’s okay by me.
Day 2
What if I were dead?
Would my one life have mattered?
What if I’m alive?
Day 3
Stuttered in pages –
life inside remembrances,
howls a paper wind.
Day 4
Then, I was angry
at ev’rything that rippled
and moved at random.
Day 5
I can see rumpled
corners around each morning –
darkness escaping.
Day 6
One can flee from death
to find herself, looking back
at what might have been.
Day 7
Regret is wasted
on a past, already gone.
There is only now.
Day 8
Why do we always
relinquish our sovereignty
over a trifle?
Day 9
Who can know the hour
when a dream meets its demise?
Dreams can sleep in hope.
Morning, breath
As morning reaches where only night had been,
dew once more settles on the brittle earth
and breath returns to one,
so all can breathe again.
The sound of your laugh.
I first posted this a few years ago. The reason I did so then is the same I do so now, to celebrate my wife’s birthday. In the digital age, discovering a person’s age is as easy as a cursor, a mouse, and a nosy desire to know something. But, in the interest of propriety, I say simply, “Happy _____ birthday, babe!”
Babe, you still brighten the road before me…
Poetry: rebuilding the world through the un-wasted beauty of redemptive syntax
Dylan Thomas, a favorite poet and writer, says this about words in poetry:
And these words were, to me, as the notes of bells, the sounds of musical instruments, the noises of wind, sea, and rain, the rattle of milkcarts, the clopping of hooves on cobbles, the fingering of branches on a window pane, might be to someone, deaf from birth, who has miraculously found his hearing…There they were, seemingly lifeless, made only of black and white, but out of them, out of their own being, came love and terror and pity and pain and wonder and all the other vague abstractions that make our ephemeral lives dangerous, great, and bearable. -as quoted by James Hillman in “The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart” (a must read, by the way).
I bemoan earlier days when poets were the prophets of the people. Words, stories and cultural anecdotes were the food-stuff of our existence, not the quaint, winter-hazed mist on the edges of our choked, windowed lives. They took center stage where the very words themselves were the Homeric epic of small existences writ large through bardic retelling to others thirsty to feel their enjoining on the stalk of shared time.
I begin here a short series of poetry about poetry, words about words; the metalanguage of the language, lost but longing to be refound, non-linear and non-pragmatic, seeking instead to rebuild the world through the unwasted beauty of redemptive syntax. To that end, I give you…
I
There you lay, face down in a puddle of
old dreams. Your brow, damp from
sweating out doubt-filled promises-
the mantric words of small men, of sullen women
bathing on stolen rooftops of run down tenements.
* * * * *
Goliath has defeated David with small,
pebbled words, slung out quietly across
the distance between them, too far
for slings filled with ancient anger.
Gruff prayers traded for slick threats.
* * * * *
Setesh broods his flustering fare. He sits
at the table of the unmemoried death,
serving up sighs and groans – the language
of lusty crows, too boisterous to still
their cantankerosity; too new and
untested to feed even their open-mouthed young.
* * * * *
Brush off the fog that settles on
your hunger for colored story, embattled songs,
for words floating and submerged under the borders,
planted in places too deep to be found
by spade, knife, wallet or hammer.
Longing letters taste like a lover’s kiss.
Dismissals – on considering responses to things
That same girl passes him in the hallway, more aloof than ever;
like the neighborhood cat that pisses on my door.
There is no response to the constant
calling of her name. Just an unambitious purr,
the casual dismissal of a creature to
unreasonable expectations.
_
I passed him on the street yesterday,
that guy I met at the poetry reading.
It was hard keeping his eyes long enough
to finish a sentence, let alone fragments
of a conversation fraught with the dismissal of a
“yes, it’s really me here” mystique.
_
She stood with a cardboard sign that read
hungry and unemployed with kids pls help god bless
I could see her through the Starbucks window
where my second Americano was already cold.
That second guy wasn’t as good as the first.
He never leaves me room for cream.
Is that too much to ask?
_
She wasn’t typically a make-up gal
preferring the girl next door simplicity
of less-is -more. But tonight
she dressed up, even eyeliner and dark,
red lipstick and skin-tight black dress.
He glanced at her twice at dinner
through the glare of his cell phone screen,
that never dimmed.
_
I sometimes shudder to think what remains
in the shadows of what’s left after encounters
dense with the unwieldy results of non-praise,
of missing the open doors, sips not taken from
frosty mugs of welcome, the sleepy
dismissals of what’s right now,
hesitant on the stoop of another’s hopes.
What can they expect from me?
Gratitude? Platitudes? Assuredness? Distraction?
A snotty hanky full of rare humility, raw and pink?
_
The game starts in half an hour.
“There once was a girl from Nantucket…”: why I write poetry
“There once was a girl from Nantucket…”
There are as many ways of self-expression as there are people…self-expressing. One can say something in many and varied ways. There, see? Unlike other, non-poetic forms of writing, poetry evokes rather than explains. Now, good prose also can do this. But, somehow, there is an economy of words and focus of emotion in poetry, a kind of escalator narrative that moves us up and down at will, that prose cannot seem to create in as neat and succinct a way. Prose tells the story of our life on paper. Poetry crunches up the paper and then makes sense of the wrinkles. Prose seeks to pull petals off the flower and, in deconstructing it, find it. Poetry imagines the soul of the flower and, in ways both sensory and direct, introduces us. Prose tells us how beautiful the flower is. Poetry tells the flower how beautiful we are. In a real sense, poetry is a flower, a kind of natural face given to the mystery of our being.
Poetry doesn’t take us from A to B. It asks why we even need B in the first place, or at least takes the longer, scenic route. Prose needs readers to engage with its detail and form. Poetry needs but to exist since it is both beauty and the suggestion thereof. It is an invitation not to read but to be read. “If a tree falls in the forest” is a question we ask ourselves. The poet shows how cool a silent tree really is. It is the art of words rather than the science of language. Moreover, the lucidity and dominance of its spatial, nuanced non-rhetoric leaves a big, front door through which those of us thirsty for something other than exactitude and definition may find our Narnia. A good narrative will give us the tale, the wardrobe, the place. Poetry helps us live the tale. Prose ushers us to turkey dinner at Grandma’s house. Poetry ushers us to Grandma whose heart was the crucible of love out of which came our dinner.
I write poetry because, for me, it is prayer. It allows extreme right-brained thinkers like myself to engage with words in more dancelike fashion, treating them more like lovers than telemarketers. I can simply close my eyes and, through the mystery of my subconscious, knit to God’s own being, walk through the veil of here to there without having to explain why or even how I got there. Poetry is perfect for people who can’t figure things out but for whom the things are just as cool unfigured out. Mystery wins every time.
If you had no idea what the hell I just wrote, you’re not quite ready for poetry…just yet.
Photo: www.blog.ted.com
bathroom mirror conversation
Wait. What are these words
etched so blatantly in this fog-ged mirror
beside the shower
curtain of immodesty;
before me yet beyond my senses,
in ears endampened, engrossed, entombed-
like my murmuring heart?
Skin awash, adazzle;
insides asleep, awaiting…
There, there I see on glass, smeared,
perhaps by finger, nose, or shoulder –
condensation wiped from misty mirrors
word for word what I most misunderstand
and least fathom.
Traces left, glances of a face
revealed yet indeterminable; known, un-strange;
but surprising now, and terrible
soft and fearsome, lithe but
too big to hide even
in the darkest corners of my indirection.
Droplets dive to swim and speak
the intangible peace of this lilting voice.
Like an eyeball widget
refusing to stand still, darting to and fro,
never seen straight on,
just out of focus,
you write this tale, shrouded
in the vagueness of a loving stare,
adroit and sharp, a repeated repetition,
repeating yet again the same words:
“I have made you clean.”
Still, I know this face.
It is yours, subtle One.
It is mine.
It is ours.
of winter
perforate my insolated heart
with rock and stone and bits of branch
that scratch the earthen sky
with its insistent icy gaze
latch yourself rock, stock and thicket,
the budless arms of winter, skin and bone
wrap themselves around the icier heart
of my discontent
cry with wonder at my lack of wonder
this chill stream of unconscious boredom
alive in its deathly hold
we, together, sleep.
where once I stood
brazen, half alive but sure
of my surety finding
none but rockbed nourishment
in place of deeper food
but I refuse to dig.
in this time, non-colored
void of spring’s lithe dance
or summer’s lazy strolls,
only still
lonely, stilled,
stillness alone.
so be it,
come, sweet winter
come, bid me bid goodnight to my childish fears
hypnotize me, embalm and embranch me
let the stark, new life of death
feed this wafer-thin soul.
kiss me with frozen resurrection
till snow becomes dew
and we both
ascend
