You will see a lot more activity on this blog in the coming year. I will be posting a new poem here every morning.
I hope you will join me on this quest to free the creative muse and cage the internal critic.
Category: Writings
Every Morning
Every morning he brings me tea
His morning ritual merging into mine.
He smiles and places the genesis of my day
on the cluttered table beside me
where it steams in a special mug – how many have there been?
The white bone china with the golden ring around the top,
The violet sprinkled, footed mug,
The greedy cup…
All eventually fallen from grace or a clumsy hand.
For now it is a handmade, sea green mug, deep and dark
With a small chip that I overlook
Because I love it.
Like the chips he overlooks in me because he loves me.
And the tea, the tea
Hot water, teabag, sugar, milk
So simple yet somehow I cannot reproduce the exact same flavour
Life goes on through thousands of mornings
and only my tea remains the same.
He drinks coffee.
#1
Fishbone Melody
Fishbone Melody
Like small plastic fishbone tag tethers
That lurk in the necks of new sweaters
Melodies wait to surface and nag
Till both of my hands hold grocery bags.
When both my hands clutch the truck steering wheel
Melody fishbones begin to reveal
Snippets of songs with potential to be
The number one hit that’s the making of me.
But when the truck stops and my sweater’s removed
And the grocery bags are all emptied of food
And I eagerly reach for my pen to write down
The tune that followed me home from downtown
Like the empty bag that lies on the floor
Of the truck and waits till I open the door
It leaps and it stumbles as if it’s possessed
By a drunken magpie in search of its nest
And my number one hit floats away on a breeze.
I guess some songs aren’t meant to be written by me.
Entropy’s Call
Entropy’s Call
You are the day, I am the dawn
who lays her light across your lawn.
The gilding touch you cannot feel.
Ether’s fleeting ghost revealed.
You are the night I am star beams
caught in branches of your dreams.
Struggling for freedom, yet
returning nightly to your net.
You are the forest, I the river
Who murmurs deep and makes you shiver,
Till your darkness echoes long
within the passion of my song.
You are the sea, I the track
of Moon and Sun upon your back.
A crooked, coruscated skein
that leads you home and back again.
You are the mountain, I the crown,
of ice and snow that cool your brow.
Frozen symbiotic rime;
Your diamond till the end of time.
You are, I am, we are as two
until the world is made anew.
Till rivers turn and run uphill
And dreams of valour and free will
leach into cracked and rusted soil.
Till mountains melt and oceans boil.
Till sun is ice and moon enkindled.
Till all that was divine has dwindled.
Till Aurora snuffs her fire.
Till snow burns and all desire
descends to ash; entropy’s call.
I am, you are, my end, my all.
Many thanks yet again to my writing group for the input that helped me revise and polish this poem, and to my partner for inspiring it.
Poetic Forms and Hodags
I recently came across a challenge in the latest Writer’s Digest magazine to write a poem with ten lines, with each line having ten syllables; rhyme scheme optional. So I gave it a try and used an ab ba rhyme scheme with an aa scheme for the middle stanza. I happened to be looking out my bedroom window at the time and saw a hodag. A hodag, for the uninitiated, is when a stump or branch or any formation looks like something else, usually an animal. I don’t know how localized this word is. Possibly it’s a northern BC thing. Anyway, there I was looking at a branch stub that looked like a little cat and I started writing.
Hodags
The broken branch resembles a grey cat
Perched, waiting, twig tail twitching in the breeze.
“Hodags” he calls them. Lurking in the trees
And at the corner of your eyes. Leaf bat,
Bear stump, moss toad; visual delusions
Bark owl, shade wolf; optical illusions.
Hodags. He calls them when we go walking.
Turn again to leaf and moss, shade and bark.
To stump and branch, silent now, but after dark
Hodags wake, smell my scent, and go stalking.
Anagrams as Form Poems – Original Art or Personal Masochism?
Occasionally I will write an anagrammatic poem; one where each line is an anagram of the first one. It’s a strange little form that I believe I have invented because I certainly have never heard of anyone else subjecting themselves to this form of literary masochism.
There are plenty of poetic forms out there that dictate rhyme schemes, meter, how many syllables per line, repeating lines etc… but so far I’ve never bumped into anyone doing the anagram poem.
Granted, the computer is a great boon to the anagrammer (no, I don’t use any ‘software’ to generate words! That’s cheating).
I come up with a first line, fairly long (more potential), and hopefully with a good variety of letters (‘e’ is the most commonly used letter in the English language – anyone who’s ever watched Jeopardy knows that!). Then I copy and paste it below and reduce it to a list of letters. Example. “I never thought of myself as a masochist” would look like this:
aaa eee ii ooo u c ff g hhh l mm n r ssss ttt v y
Then you start pulling the letters down and making words and creating, hopefully, intelligent lines that make some sort of sense on some plain of existence! Sometimes the original line doesn’t even make the final poem and although the result may not be earthshattering poetry, it uncovers some rich words and word combinations that you may want to use in another poem.
O Child, O Sing
I desire no long, soft moan; no witch charmed fever.
Romance carved words of this feeling in the moon.
She looms, dreaming forever, not confined. I watch
conditional freedoms grow, even from the chains
of failing memories, coveted crowns, and the horn
on the moon, sin scarred, formed of light. We cave in.
I have fed the incandescent mirrors of moon glow
I never dance far from the two omens. o child, o sing.
Sunshine after Rain
What a state of grace is the first sunlight glinting on the wild rose. What a sigh of relief after days of droning rain!
Just as predicted the sun came out this morning and bathed the sodden landscape with warmth and the promise of summer bliss.
Sunshine After Rain
Earth steams and streams
from beneath the rains,
pendant prisms
quiver in the breath of darkness passing
casting rainbows aside,
they dive down the back of my neck,
cool clean rivulets, I become
just one more facet of her terrain,
my name a distant whisper
drowned in the sound of wind in the trees
as she shivers them free
and sighs.
“Your Eyes Meet Mine” A Poem That Photographers Might Appreciate
I’m not a photographer-I just take pictures. But I have a real appreciation for the creative energy that real photographers invest in their art. The energy that means the difference between a snapshot and a work of art. It’s usually easy to spot the difference – the work of art will take your breath away. That happened to me one time at an exhibit of old photographs in our local art gallery. The young girl, on a bike beside the parade, looking straight at the photographer and me. I don’t have a copy of that photograph, but the one featured here, of my father, feels similar to me in that it “Meets my Eyes”. To all my photographer friends I offer this poem.
Your Eyes Meet Mine
Your eyes meet mine.
You ride your bicycle beside the black and white parade.
Did they have colour back then or did
everyone live in black and white?
Was life really simpler, or does distance lend a mellow myopia?
Shades of grey more vivid than any rainbow.
Your eyes meet mine.
“Why are you taking a picture of me?” they say.
“The parade’s over there.”
But what’s one more picture of a parade compared to this
moment of suspended bemusement; human connection.
Your eyes meet mine.
You’re not looking at a camera; you’re looking at a person.
Surrounded by frame after frame of majorettes and marching bands
Face after face of flat eyes looking at the machine.
They are still looking at the machine.
Your eyes are still looking at a person.
They are looking at me.
I look back.
I see you, the person.
Your eyes meet mine.
Was it still a novelty to have your picture taken?
Before swiveling surveillance cameras
documented our daily desperation,
and amateur videographers captured our lapses in sanity
for the consumption of the jaded masses
Does the camera really capture part of our soul?
Your eyes meet mine.
You understand.
It’s not the camera that takes the photograph
but the person behind the camera.
and even if we can’t deny the camera access to our image;
We can still allow or deny the photographer, and the viewer,
access to our soul.
Your eyes meet mine
I am honoured.
You May Live a Long Time: Are You Ready – book review
I recently read an exceptionally good book by Lyndsay Green, titled “You May Live a Long Time: Are You Ready?” In it she tackles the concept of a ‘successful old age’ (not just financial success either!) and let’s face it, many of us are not only guilty of not planning for our retirement (waiting to win the lottery doesn’t count) we’re in absolute denial about it! Lyndsay talked to many seniors who are, under her terms ‘successful’, in that they are living happy, fulfilled lives. The kicker is that my mum is one of the seniors she interviewed and I didn’t realize it, while I was reading it, something that one of her interviewees (they all have ficticious names) made me jump and say out loud “That’s my Mum!”
But aside from the fact that my mother’s successful seniorhood is enshrined between the covers (along with many others) this is a very intelligent assessment of what kind of behaviours and attitudes we need to cultivate to ensure the golden years are as happy and fulfilled as we’d like. Lyndsay has a real knack for seeing the patterns that emerged as she interviewed these lovely seniors and translating them into simple, actionable guides for those of us creeping up on those golden years, many of us with trepidation, some of us with abject horror (There are days…).
I would definitely recommend this book no matter what age you are because many of the behaviours and attitudes espoused are excellent ways to enjoy life here and now, not just when you get older.
Check out Lyndsay’s blog and you can find her book at amazon.ca
Rapture Today – Figures!
Bill and I just purchased a brand new 25 foot trailer (with a slide out). We are already in raptures over our lovely new home away from home. Haven’t really been paying much attention to the foo-forah about the latest ‘end of the world’ foolishness so when I realized that it is supposed to happen at 6pm (apparently it’s scheduled for 6pm everywhere, convenient, that) I sighed deeply and said “It figures! We finally seem to have gotten all the ducks in a row and the darned old Rapture’s going to happen.” Oh well, I guess I might have felt more cheated if it happened right after I’d paid off the trailer. Kind of like when our house burned down years ago – somehow deep inside there was an appreciation that I hadn’t bothered to wash the dishes before leaving that morning. I suppose that if I was a more cautious person I’d be covering my bases and praying my ass off, but what with 1984, Nostradamus, Y2K, Killer meteor scares, and the ever-present (and real) threat of nuclear annihilation, I just don’t care anymore. If the end’s coming it’s going to find me completely unprepared because I’ll be busy living my life just as if I was in my right mind.
Linda Studley 