Blizzard blind,
vision veiled by shades of white.
Snow accumulates,
known markers entombed.
She struggles to remember
through haze of memories,
her life without these days
of whirling, pummeling storms.
Frozen iced in daze.
Time shifts. Skies clear.
Sadly, somewhere in her mind,
she remains
buried in the drifts.
Although I am in San Diego for two months, I’m watching the weather channel, seeing Boston get hit with a historic blizzard. Somehow this poem came to my pen. Image from Pixabay.com
Mother Nature chagrined,
shrouded in grey low-slung sky.
Rains gush, pummel sideways
as she weeps beyond control.
Strong oaks uprooted,
her scalp bared in raw splotches.
Gales punish the unrepentant.
We the offenders struggle
bending at right angles from the waist,
plodding toward imagined escape.
Our feeble umbrellas abandoned,
their broken ribs litter the sodden path.
Has her sun forsaken us, our sins too great?
Depression’s black hole inverted,
is this vortex our fate?
It drowns even the most optimistic,
hope abandoned in storming grief.
We fear the apocalypse has begun.
**I am a positive person – really I am! Sometimes I have no idea why the pen turns to the dark side.
Thunder raged outside.
Rain battered windows
rattled trees.
She slumped inside.
His words, his memory,
his voice. All hollow now.
Ink blurred by tears,
love’s letters torn to shreds
Ripped asunder.
Bits and pieces of paper
scattered across the floor.
Love spent, annihilated.
Too many bits and pieces,
impossible to reassemble.
She collapsed into the abyss
eye of the storm.
Day 13: National Poetry Writing Month. Prompt from Toads was a real challenge today: 1) Write a poem using 3 to 13 words from the following quotation:
“People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in the ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.” ~ Diane Setterfield
2) AND the poem must employ a metaphor: a thing regarded as representative or symbolic of something else, especially something abstract. In Done, the storm rages outside and inside. Love letters torn into bits and pieces are her life; in her mind, too shredded to reassemble.
FOR A MORE POSITIVE AND FUN POST TODAY, go to my prosery post, for dVerse, The Second Act.
When to hit the return
on her Smith Corona ~
typed one font
had no delete
no warning sounds
carriage just stopped.
End of the line,
so she gave up.
Too much misspelled.
Angry eraser holes
at best, visible smudges.
Life on a page
ripped out in disgust,
crumpled beside tin ash tray,
empty pack nearby.
No sequel here.
Written for dVerse….in reply to the prompt about “temperature”.
This started from reading the line “I sat in bed in the morning writing poetry, hitting the return key whenever I wanted.” in Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends. Went from that to the old days of typing on my very small, portable Smith Corona typewriter all through my college days….and somehow came out with this post. Go figure! Photo from pixabay.com
Is there a beauty in insipidity,
blending in to all around? Stupidity
amassed beyond the pale,
in group-think, mass-appeal.
Invisibility, thou art cruel
spiteful invalidity.
Tread instead through morbidity
following ancient ways
as Plato did with Socrates.
Follow deeper still
with final sip,
hemlock
release.
Mish is hosting Quadrille Monday at dVerse, the virtual pub for poets. Today she asks us to include the word “sip” within our exactly 44 word poem, sans title. For some reason, I went to the dark side with this one: “insipidity” and “sip.” Pub opens at 3 PM Boston time. Come join us!
She tries to concentrate.
Christmas tree lights
carols, cards,
and gingerbread men.
But clouds gather
like an impending storm,
memories.
And she misses them.
In all the joyful celebrations of the Christmas season, we forget that for some, this is a very difficult time of year.
caught in summer storm
damp hair curls on neck
feet squish inside shoes
skirt billows in gusty wind –
tears masquerade as rain
She sits slumped,
rot gut whiskey bottle
clutched in hands.
Stitch in side, she aches.
Time blurrs
lost in last nine shots.
Pennies by her feet
tossed by do-good passerby
don’t jar her mind.
Can’t think straight or at all.
Too far gone to live
not quite enough to die.
Written for Tuesday’s Poetics at dVerse, the virtual pub for poets. Jilly is hosting and asks us to take one or two well known adages and significantly change them! Can you find the two I’ve used?
Photo from Pixabay.com Answer Key: Stanza 1 from “A stitch in time saves nine.” and Stanza 2 is from “A penny for your thoughts. ” Explaining further, in case you’re not familiar with having a stitch (pain) in your side: often happens to people when they’re running … or can be a sign of other medical problems too.
The girl sat awhile,
gazing out over the waves
from a solitary sandbar.
Pebbles and rock ground fine,
parched by harsh sun,
as wave after wave came,
again and again.
Awash in waves of guilt,
drowning on dry land.
Nothing curled in the air
but the sound of nothing,
the hymn of nothing,
the humming . . .
Written for Real Toads where the prompt is to write a piggyback poem:
First and last lines should be quoted from two different poems. First line here is from Maureen Hynes, The Horses, the Sorrow, the Umbilicus; last line is from Mark Strand’s She. Photo from Pixabay.com
“apologizing to the other passengers. As if car sickness was a crime.” page 111, 5th line in 3rd paragraph of The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini.
“You the sand I’ve crawled across.” page 111, 5th line in 3rd stanza in Jelly Roll by Kevin Young.
Disillusioned
Apologizing to the other passengers
as if car sickness was a crime.
Commuter train to end of line
end comes everyday.
Nauseating life of dregs,
there and back and there again.
Everyday merry-go-round hell.
Cell phone glued to your ear,
apologies for my stench.
I was you until I burned,
abandoned by the man.
You happy across the aisle,
my respect tossed to winds
abracadabra, like magic dust.
Path of self-worth, weed-whacked,
lost soul like tumble weed.
Arid dunes, grain smothers grain,
insurmountable pile.
My brain is a desert skull.
Bleached-bare eye sockets,
parched blind of caring.
And you sit there like him.
You the sand I’ve crawled across.
Written for dVerse, the virtual pub for poets. Amaya asks us to bridge the gap: take a book near your bedstand, open it to page 111; copy the 5th sentence/line in the 3rd paragraph. That is the first line of your original poem. Choose a 2nd book and do the same but, this is the last line of your poem. And she admonishes, NO CHEATING! When I saw the line in The Kite Runner I was ready to pick a different book! But, no cheating…so Disillusionment is what came out of this prompt.
lillian the home poet 