What’s in Your Book Spines?

i
The Happiness Project
Swing Swagger Drape
A Hundred Daffodils

ii
You’re Wearing That?
The Audacity of Hope

iii
Plain and Simple:
If I Had My Life To Live Over
I Would Pick More Daisies
Off Camera

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NaPoWriMo Day 10: My suggested prompt was used for everyone today! Stack ’em up and write  Book Spine Poetry, hopefully from books on your book shelves.
My three poems include titles from: Gretchen Rubins’s The Happiness Project, Jane Slicer-Smith’s knitting pattern book Swing Swagger Drape, Jane Kenyon’s White Daffodils; You’re Wearing That? by Deborah Tannen and Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope; and the third one includes Sue Bender’s Plain and Simple, If I Had My Life to Live Over I Would Pick More Daisies edited by Sandra Haldeman Martz, and Ted Koppel’s Off Camera.  Happy Sunday!

Glass Jar World

I am afloat
no eyes, no touch
in this senseless world.

This cadaver cavernous world
dreams dissipated, despair afloat
you see me, but do not touch.

Ignored. Here, not. Not for touch.
Gasping in your fragile world,
I am no one, simply afloat,

afloat, a glass shard, in your no-touch world.

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Tritina written for Day 7, NaPoWriMo. The Tritina: three, three line stanzas and a final concluding line. Three “end words” are used to conclude the lines of each stanza, in a set pattern of ABC, CAB, BCA and all three words must appear in the final line. Another poetry sudoku! Photo Credit: Pickled 2, 2009 by Antoine A. R. Hunt, Bermudian, 1967: in the Collection of the Bermuda National Gallery.

Paging Vincent Van Gogh

Hybrid sunflowers
big time flower power.
Fast growing giant Kong,
Bashful Lemon Queen,
bold eye catching.
Ms. Mars, uncommonly gorgeous.
Elf, compact charmer
and Little Becka too.
Madly floriferous Candy,
Strawberry Blonde, Frilly
and Crimson Blaze,
dazzle with sensuous high definition.
Sunny Bunch, Honey Bears
precious beauties,
incredible lovable faces.
All flummoxed on your easel,
sowed one quarter inch deep
in oil, denied full sun,
borders and beds.
Your fame, their demise.

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Written for Day 6 NaPoWriMo, using day five’s prompt: Create a poem using words from a seed catalogue. This is from Burpee’s 2016 catalogue, pages for sunflowers. All words, including title, are exactly as written in Burpee’s except for those italicized. Kong, Bashful, Lemon Queen, Ms. Mars, Elf, Little Becka, Candy, Strawberry Blonde, Frilly, Crimson Blaze, Sunny Bunch, and Honey Bears are all hybrid sunflower varieties. I do love the Found Poetry genre. Photo: from beautiful Cape Cod’s Provincetown, several years ago. 

Fannie Quigley, 1870-1944

Train moved round the bend, civilized now,
not then. Those days, she chose life
off the beaten track. No lookin’ back.
Twenty-six claims staked and panned.
Never hit it rich the way we define it.
Kantishna, home to caribou, moose
and Fannie Quigley. One tough broad.
Slung back whiskey and cussed with ‘em all.
Calloused hands skinned her kill
then rolled flaky pie crust,
bear lard, the secret.
Legendary in her day and beyond,
she took no train but her own.

Written for NaPoWriMo 2016 Day 5 and dVerse Pub for Poets where Bjorn suggests we use the idea of railroad/trains for a poem today. Photo Credits: from our Alaska trip last year. We visited the remote cabin of Fannie Quigley.

April Cruelty

Crocus seduce, daffodils beam,
we walk lighter, brighter.
Young women shed coats,
bellies concealed in down
bloom pregnant joy.

Temptress Spring,
hips swaying in soft breezes,
sashays to bed budding green.
Wakes at dawn,
cold white kisses shimmer,
laughs flurry at our foolish trust.

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Photo Credits: That’s me, this morning, April 4. On the porch in my bathrobe appalled at this cruel April snow! Crocus  photo by Swirls 71.
Written as a quadrille (44 words) for dVerse using the word “shimmer” and for NaPoWriMo Day 4‘s prompt to write about the cruelest month.

Bermuda in Style

Rain pelts, lightning tiara,
emerald green limbs
drip gold loquat jewels,
sapphire seas belt her girth.
Bermuda, dark and stormy,
wears her weather well.

Various storm brewing photos and their aftermath in Bermuda over the past two months. Yes: the water is really that colorful!!  No photoshopping done. Poem offered for NaPoWriMo Day 3 (without prompt). The loquat is a delicious fruit that grows on a tree and is ripe when golden. The Dark ‘n Stormy is also the national drink (made with Goslings Black Seal Rum and Ginger Beer).