Day: July 20, 2023

The lights go out

And the pure of heart  will see right to
The beginning of the end of me and you
There are no men, the women look again
There’s something in the fire looks like my pen
But who can write when  all the the lights go out?
The women are not women,  the men are  not about
The shadows dance with winds  on lighted walls
The fire burns  redder and the devils  call
It’s hell in here, baby , keeping  living just for you
Who knows what  to do
With the pointed dancing shoe
Half a pair and the women cannot bear
Labour’s lost
Tell  us what it cost

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We lose ourselves in shadows and may fall.

Katherine  March 7, 2017 

The world is exists but I just wish to flee
The flowers come into bud but I can’t see.
The birds have built their new   small nests again
Birds forget, but memory feeds our pain.

When I get trapped inside this mud black silt
I forget the tools my mind has lately  built
Again it feels eternal and unkind
The sorrowing  fills the endless realms of mind.

The mind  helps us to mediate and muse
We need it to give weight to different views
But   inwardness can  build up dangerous walls
We lose ourselves in shadow  and may fall.

The life within us will rise up again
If  we  can accept our mental pain.

Like refugees, we come to love alone

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Underneath the shallow pools lies sand
Where shells are  fractured by the ocean’s blows
We  soon  learn what  being alive demands

To bare feet on sunny days beckoned
The warm wet trickles in between the toes
Underneath the shallow pools lies sand

In whose sums are human  kisses kenned
Calculation, not so bleak it shows
We learn by pain, true living makes demands

God allows the  abacus unchained
To sum us up as if we are unknown
Underneath the pools,  are these his hands?

Who will be allowed and who detained?
Like refugees, we come to love alone
We try  to be alive, despite the pain

Our hearts are fragile shells, not heavy stones
We, soft flesh, enraptured by framed bones.
Darkly on the  beach we humans stand
The fretting waves cry out with love’s demands

I write well.yeah super Nell

What the hell,a villanelle!
It looks too hard for such as me
Still I will write ,yes,I write well

I have a story I can tell
It’s from the English who love tea
What a hell,oh villanelle

I saw a man with a sea shell
I asked him for a pod of pea
I write well.yeah super Nell

I often wonder if I smell
As I drink so much  greenish tea
What’s s to tell ,my villanelle?

But worry makes life into hell
And it’s bad for those who see
I write well,but who can tell?

I must take much charity
If you ask, what is your fee?
What the hell oh villanelle
I write well but   life is hell.

In good form

closeup photo of lions cubs
Photo by Magda Ehlers on Pexels.com

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/74593/in-good-form

“A well-turned line, a sparkling rhyme: craft is essential to the art of poetry, writes Poetry editor Christian Wiman in the October 2012 issue. He explains:

The sound and form of the poem are everything; they buffet it against its hard journey through time and indifference. Or, to change the metaphor, they enable it to insinuate itself into the hard carapace of our consciousness, so that the poem’s “message”…won’t just bounce off the glaze of us. Craft matters because life matters. Craftless poetry is not only as perishable as the daily paper, it’s meretricious, disrespectful (of its subjects as well as its readers)….

Why do you think craft matters? Do well-crafted poems hit you harder and remain with you longer, as Wiman suggests? Why might poems devoid of craft seem disrespectful—perhaps because they demand our time without rewarding us with pleasure, insight, or staying power?

The most recent issue of Poetry provides plenty of fodder for such questions. It offers several poems in received forms, such as Joshua Mehigan’s sonnet “The Professor” and Elizabeth Seydel Morgan’s villanelle “September 2011.” And it features invented forms as well. Take Marie Ponsot’s “Private and Profane,” reprinted from a 1957 issue:”

I hope it’s a random sample

My doctor is God
Why can’t he heal you then?

God is my doctor
Where did he train?

The doctor wants a urine sample
I hope it’s a random one

The doctor wants to take my temperature
Where to?

The doctor says it’s a systemic infection
Can’t he install a new system in you ?

He wants me to take it easy
Fake it.

He talks in paragraphs
No, you idiot, parables!

My doctor is very odd
Get even with him somehow

Are numbers very odd?
Yes, the odd ones are even odder than the even ones

Are doctors real?
Yes, if you think they are.

Sea and sand

In a cotton dress by Morecambe Bay
On Arnside’s little beach below the Knott
I stand where sea and sand on my feet play

My feet enjoy the water, ripples,rays
I remember this, the waters fret
In a cotton dress in Morecambe Bay

We see the Barrow Train, the River flows
Feel the pebbles slippery,cool and wet
I stand where sea and sand on my feet play

As the sun sank, Grange and Cartmel glowed
The Priory’s ruins paid all beauty’s debt
I love my dress, in sun, in Morecambe Bay

My bony feet look thin, the water sways
I wish I could dissolve, skin holds me back
I stand where sea and sand on my feet play

Moments of great beauty guard the track
We may forget the sea shells splintered wrack.
In a cotton dress my mother made
I loved where sea and sand on my feet played