Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt. based on the concept of the language of flowers, fit perfectly with Sue Vincent’s photo prompt, below. Fields of bluebells belong to the fairies.
Once again, I did a watercolor ground and then a separate watercolor for the trees, which I cut apart and placed on the ground. Then I consulted with the Oracle. She did not disappoint.
ghostlight lingers blue
sailing haunted on flowersong
surrounded by magic
the listening voices of trees
here fools fly starborn
dancing like angels
into the sacred rhythms
of earth
My poem, “The Same Old Song”, is among the writing posted today at The Ekphrastic Review in response to Mariano Fortuny’s painting “Fantasy on Faust”, above.
The NaPoWriMo prompt was to write a hay(na)ku, which consists of a three-line stanza, where the first line has one word, the second line has two words, and the third line has three words. I decided to take my poem and condense each stanza creating a new distilled version. The formatting did not translate to the posting on the Ekphrastic Review website, but I think you can see where the stanza breaks should be. Read the original poem here.
This was an excellent exercise for someone like me who tends to wordiness, and I will definitely try it again.
Interiors are slowly
folding in—where do they go?–
invisibly departing
with each new exhalation
of air, to be reflected
in the afternoon sun, held
light on the wing of a bird,
to travel with the rivers,
following liquid paths that
enjoin our lost ways to sing,
reaching beyond the other
side, to become vast, unmapped,
unlocated everywhere–
to be cast out, opening–
What is it we seek?–the stuff
that accumulates, broken,
unrepairable, layered
over landscapes unable
to breathe? or will we become
unclenched, holding nothing but
earth wrapped up in endless sky?
Frank at dVerse challenged us to write a 7 line poem with a positive feeling. I’m not sure this exactly meets the positive bar, but it’s headed more that way than a lot of what I’ve recently written. I also used 7 syllables in each line, which I seem to remember as a form I saw somewhere, although I can’t remember where.
This is also my offering, off prompt, for NaPoWriMo. Art inspired by Diebenkorn.
Blackbird, he says,
but there’s black and there’s black–
what color the feathers
the outer layer, not one
flat hue, more
complicated,
changed by
lightdarkyearsangleseasonlandscapesituation
and what is worn
inside, manipulated by movement
or inability to move–
what is invisibly
embraced or
abused, blood
colored by
breathtouchsilenceangerforgivenessaccemptancejuxtaposition
the subtlties lost
in labels, the categories fixed
in time—if we gave
the ordinary new
mysterious names,
looked underneath
the definitions—
we could open pages
and pages
heretofore
unseen
of inexplicable
and enchanted
life
The NaPoWriMo Day 8 prompt asks us to “start with a line by another poet”–my eyes lit up when I saw the name Richard Siken–a wonderful artist/poet. The first line above is from “The Language of the Birds”, one of my favorite of his poems. Click the title to read it.
we are try
-ing to breathe, desperate
for clean air
uninfect
-ed by greed, ego, exploit
-ation, pollution
the moon does
not belong to you–
she belongs
to the night
sky, the cycle of light re
-turning from the dark
she dances
vast elemental
orbits to
time centered
beyond your indifference, your
vainglory, your lies
For the NaPoWriMo day 7 prompt, a poem based on a news article. You can find the news story I used here. I took the photo, above, out my window at dusk last night.
The art is inspired once again by Matisse. And Los Lobos, with a great video rendition of Kiko.
The NaPoWriMo prompt for Day 6 asked us to be a voice from inside Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights”. Although I did a voice from outside the painting last year–On Seeing Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights” –for NaPoWriMo, I couldn’t write anything from inside of it that didn’t seem too depressing for me today. So I chose another piece of Bosch’s for my Ekphrastic review.
I found the drawing above titled in 2 ways–The Trees Have Ears and the Field Has Eyes and The Hearing Forest and the Seeing Field. Both are true.
the eyes talk–
have you heard them?
they breathe music
of earth stars–
light opening everything
as if you could fly
The curve is filled with an intensity of emotions that stretches to eternity.
The curve trembles in fear.
The curve can taste the edges of the silence in its tentacles.
O Galileo! What path can we follow away from the gravity of Earth?
The curve is empty, spilling its contents into a weightless void.
The mirror gathers the songs of the lost and echoes them back in a pulsing of 808s.
The mirror reflects the images of the night sky, magnifying the sound.
Remember the pattern: E=mc2.
The voiceless parabola crosses between the lines.
The voiceless parabola becomes the lines.
Galileo burns all the mirrors.
If E=mc2 what does K=?
Our illusions will fail to be optical.
Our unborne illusions will overshadow our minds.
Our illusions will be part of the equation.
(Que Sera, Sera)
Our illusions will dance on our graves,
stretching forever along the curve of our blindness,
into the vast unknown.
I thought the NaPoWriMo prompt list of random directions for writing a poem would result in something silly. But that’s not where it wanted to go.
how is survival?
is it away beyond?–
a lost sense of arrival,
neither here nor gone–
is it away beyond,
tethered unto itself?–
neither here nor gone,
undefined, unfelt,
tethered unto itself,
like stars fading at dawn–
undefined, unfelt,
a whispered shadow song
like stars fading at dawn–
a journey, a myth,
a whispered shadow song
of silence and death–
A journey, a myth,
a lost sense of arrival
in silence and death–
how is survival?
A pantoum for NaPoWriMo, where we consider rhymes, and Jane Dougherty’s Pictures and Poetry Challenge where she posted the Turner painting, above, and some words from the Francis Ledwidge poem The Dead Kings as inspiration.
My painting was inspired by the Turner painting, and Ron Sexsmith provides the musical coda.
My first bike was a childhood gift, way too big for me, that my father lovingly assembled one Christmas Eve so it would be waiting by the tree the next morning. No speeds, pedal brakes. As I grew into them I turned the wheels faster and faster until I left them behind.
It took a few years before I began pedaling my way around the city, this time with 5 speeds and hand brakes. My legs moved the wheels around and around once again, through the park, dodging traffic during transit strikes, climbing flights of stairs as the wheels bumped my body to my apartment door.
Finally I had an elevator! And then a baby. No space for cycles that were not attached to a carriage, a stroller, then tri and then bi accompanied by training wheels. My legs walked beside them, watching my children turn them around and around until they too were flying on their own, faster and faster away from my slowing path.
Now all those wheels live only in remembered rotations.
These days my legs spin in a pattern that repeats itself, over and over, in the same location. The world outside my window does the passing by.
circles
pivoting around
the still point
The NaPoWriMo prompt for day 1 is “write a self-portrait poem in which you make a specific action a metaphor for your life”. For all our lives these days…
As I did two years ago for NaPoWriMo, I’ve been working on art to use in April for a number of months, this time inspired by the work of Matisse and Richard Diebenkorn. The circles come via Matisse.
K. 