photography

Poetry Postcard Fest 2021: Pantoum and Moon

I want to spiral with stars,
I want to breathe deeply
of the galaxies–
fly into vast silences

thrown towards the essence
of the galaxies,
the echo of silence–
I want to spiral with stars

For the Poetry Postcard Fest this year, I decided to do all moon postcards from my own photos as I had already done a series of them for one of the Kick-About prompts so I had the beginnings started. Last year I did shadormas for the poems using part of the last line of the previous poem as the first line for the next one.

But this year I decided to do a pantoum, giving me two lines for my next poem. These are the first and the last cards, the beginning and the end of the poem. I enjoyed it, but I don’t think it was as successful poetically, as I kind of got bogged down in the middle by the repetition. Too much of a good thing–41 stanzas is a lot.

Since I made 41 postcards I sent them all–to the 32 people on my list, and the rest I sent to friends. In return I got 25 from people in my Fest group, plus 2 from friends. You can see the ones I received at the top. Last year one postcard arrived in December, so more may show up. Once again I enjoyed the variety in both the postcards and the poems I received. Not to mention finding real mail in the mailbox–that’s always a treat.

I intended to post all the postcards and poems I sent last year for PoPo 2020, but I didn’t get very far. I did do 3 posts with the first 6 cards–you can see them here:
https://kblog.blog/2020/10/02/popo-2020/
https://kblog.blog/2020/10/18/popo-2020-part-2/
https://kblog.blog/2021/06/14/popo-2020-part-3/

They may still get posted at some point…and also more of this year’s moon cards. You can never have too much of either the moon or pantoums.

You can read about the Poetry Postcard Fest, and register for 2022, here.

Also linking to dVerse Open Link Night, where Lisa (who also participated in the Postcard Fest and made and sent me one of her beautiful postcards) is hosting.

anomalies

phantasma
goria exposed
by shadows
dissolving
into borrowed wings eclipsed
by casting out light

11 surrealist women artists take centre stage for the ...

I’m behind a few weeks on posting my contributions to the Kick-About, but this is the most recent, a collage inspired by Sheila Legge’s Phantom of Surrealism, above. Masked in roses, she was photographed in a white dress and gloves, surrounded by pigeons in Trafalgar Square, a performance inspired by a painting by Dali.

Woman with a Head of Roses, 1935. By Salvador Dalí ...

I was drawn to the statuesque quality of the photo, particularly given the location, and I can never resist using birds in a collage.

And of course we all don our own masks–some are just more obvious than others.

unrest

Another mostly sleepless night. But the Oracle sees beauty in those hours too. And how else would I have seen the sliver of the moon?

And look closely on the right–there’s Saturn too.

who is this self
sailing slowly through the dark

always away

blue with haunted oceans
flying from the ghosts of time

breathless as the dance
of skyholes
lingering in starfire
awakening the open eyes
of this goodnight

fullness

Full was the first word that jumped out at me from the Oracle, but in the end it didn’t fit into what she wanted me to say. But it works as a title I think.

When I’m looking for images to illustrate a poem I search through old posts. I found some of these photos when I searched for trees in memadtwo, from a trip I made to visit my brother and his wife when they were living in Asheville, NC. Like me, he’s moved a lot–after 15 years and 3 cities in North Carolina, they are on their way back to Ohio again. So I probably won’t get back to Asheville.

But the photos and my memories of the landscape fit with the mood of the Oracle.s words today.

when moonspirit walks between
nightshading

listen like stones in the riverpath

follow deep rootblankets
through dark earth

resting at dawn
quiet beneath birdtendriled
ancient trees

shadorma/liala

the landscape
pauses, quiescent–
waiting on
the edge of
movement—no time passes here–
framed in memories

Colleen’s #TankaTuesday prompt this week was an interesting one–

  • First, choose your favorite syllabic poetry form. Write your poem.
  • Next, give your poem some different characteristics to make it something different. You can change the syllable count, rhyme scheme (add or get rid of it), anything you want to create a new form. Write this poem.
  • Give your new syllabic poetry form a name.

I chose shadorma. How to change it? I had noticed before that all the lines had odd numbers of syllables, so I added one syllable to each line, to make them all even.

landscape pauses,
quiescent, waiting on
movement’s edge—no
time passes here–
a stilled photograph of silence–
time framed in memories

Thinking of a name was difficult. Shadorma seems to be totally made up, although several people noted the similarity to the word shadow. So I decided to pick a name with a beginning from light. I ended up with Liala, because I like the sound of it and the repetition of the a ending. It’s evidently a girls’ name but I could find no meaning for it.

There is a subtle difference between the odd and even syllabled poems, but I’m not sure which one I like best.

The photos are cropped versions of panoramas composed by my older daughter from photos she took in the mountains of Arizona where my father requested that we spread his ashes. My mother did not make any request except to be cremated, but we managed to find the very same place to spread her ashes years later after her death.

raw night

The moon in her current path shines across my bed at about 2 am. She makes sure I acknowledge her gift.

And of course the moon and the Oracle are old friends…

beneath the shadow
of my dream
language sleeps
in a forest of wind

the moon sings me
into its lightship
soaring on mad tongues
without a whisper of why