shadorma

No Match

The music
of your tongue is sweet,
flattering–
yet I re
main unmoved, quite resistant
to the tiresome songs

you string with
vague glittering charm.
A flashy
pointlessness
can be pleasant, amusing–
but rapidly fades

into the
redundancy of
easily
forgotten
old news.—May I direct you
this way, to the door?

Colleen provided the above painting, Portrait of Lady Agnew of Lochnaw by John Singer Sargent, as an ekphrastic prompt this week for Tanka Tuesday. Bjorn’s prompt at dVerse to use an AI tool had me consulting the Random Word Generator–I realized Jane had not posted one this week, so I generated the words below to choose from.

It led me in a direction I would not have thought of on my own, which is the point I think.

As to the collage–as you may have read in a previous post, I’m in the process of archiving all of my art–50+ years of it. This has led to quite a few surprises. It seems I did a group of abstract door collages in 1983–who knew? Not me, that’s for sure. The colors of this one work well with Sargent’s painting I think.

in plain sight

if I could
unknit, remove these
protective
layers—un
knot the tangled breach—release
all I think I know,

return to
pause—recollecting,
listening
to the air
breathing in voices, called by
the resonance of

forest songs,
expanding into
organic
wondering–
(time knows its own creations–
unburdened by clocks,

the display
of exactitude)–
instead, re
placing all
measurement with one quivered
spiraling motion—

I wish to
sing odes composed by
trees—to be
answered not
with thoughts or questions, purpose
or pondering—but

to embrace
my own ring-years—to
follow the
journey of
each tree season, entering
what only seems closed

because I
choose to remain un
asked—having
forgotten
how to merge, integrate my
elemental core

For earthweal, a shadorma chain about elements.

I’ve been taking my portfolios out of the storage room to photograph and archive all the art I’ve accumulated over the past 50 years. In my late 20s and early 30s I did a lot of collage in series, very different (as you can see) from what I do now. These are all from the Wood series. Besides the art there were also some (bad) poems written around collages. But there were phrases worth exploring.

I combined a poem from 1983 with one from 2018 using synonyms for Colleen’s Tanka Tuesday words, change and grow, and some of the words from Jane’s Random Word List.

The collages are interesting, even if they mostly don’t seem very wood-like to me now.

threading the needle

the sign said
catch me if you can—
I inquired
as to who
or what, but the Universe
declined to answer

instead of
illuminating,
it withdrew–
tangled, cleft–
its secrets woven into
labyrinthine curves

it looked like
a portal—but it
was only
a loophole–
false passage, another de
lusion full of knots

For dVerse OLN, hosted by Grace, where I’ve finally gotten around to using Jane’s Random Words for the week.. I’ve also finally produced a poem with the word “loophole” which I told Sun I was going to do months ago…

Poetry Postcard Fest 2022

For POPO 2022 I used postcards with buttons and altered them with text. I sent out the full 31 from my list, plus a few to friends, and received 23 list postcards and 4 from friends. My poems were all in shadorma form, taking clues from the front of the card.

There was a nice assortment of both images and poems. But the best part is making the cards themselves, and each day spontaneously composing a poem for each one, and then putting on the stamp and mailing them.

wandering
through lost synapses
thought journeys
dreamspiral
into narratives that end
open, unsequenced

you sought 1 special story
and after two years of psychic wandering
the boy said: 3 is my lucky number—what’s yours?

You can read more about the Poetry Postcard Fest, which takes place in August of every year, here. I’ve already signed up for 2023, but you have until July to register. I highly recommend it.

The Melting of Time

Snowfall.  Night.
The shore is distant.
I dream of
flying—but
I remain enclosed within
ice blue, glittering.

North seems far–
where I am has no
direction.
The landscape
retreats until almost all
is trapped within dreams.

Barren seas
echo with silence.
The world cracks.
Wind weeps in
side chasms of solitude–
the melting of time.

Sherry’s heartbreaking photo, above, that accompanied her prompt at earthweal to talk about the connections between life and the melting ice of the arctic, inspired the dreamscape of my shadorma chain, written also for Colleen’s #TankaTuesday, where Jules selected shadorma as this month’s form.

animated

I fold my
questions into cranes
and send them
flying on
the wind—what hands will catch them,
pull them down, greet them,

unjumble
and complete their dreams?
wide, deep, clear,
cast to sky,
they celebrate–streams of stars
danced in waves of moon

A shadorma quadrille for Merril’s prompt of celebration at dVerse. I also used the words she generated from Oracle II. Above is the almost-full moon shining through my window last night.

consecration

a feather,
a rose, an apple–
small pleasures,
blessings of
continuity, gifts of
joint inheritance,

of stillness–
a hallowing that
exists if
we choose to
walk with the land—unhurried,
emptied, listening

I’ve used words from Jane’s random word list this week from the Oracle II, to answer Brendan’s call at earthweal to the wild stillness

Safari

“Living day by day with elephants, he had absorbed their deeper, more philosophical cues. In fact, he discovered in them the virtues he would work to develop in himself: courage, loyalty, the ability to trust (and the good sense to know when to be distrustful), fairness, patience, diligence, kindness, and humor.”
–Vicki Constantine Croke, “Elephant Company”

Step this way–
sink deep, uncreatured,
into the
mouth entombed
in death—enter the ceaseless
current of slaughter.

Destruction
overtakes rebirth,
permanent–
we cannot
remake the magic of earth,
uninculcate ends.

Silver tongues
make promises, kill
what little
is left, drunk
with power—bleeding life out
to termination.

Elephants once roamed in Syria, Turkey, and Iraq. This species became extinct about 100 BC due to overhunting for ivory. This is still a major threat to both elephants and rhinos, along with habitat loss, which includes all the ramifications of climate change. Poachers are looking for ingredients for traditional Asian medicine. Local residents see wild animals as threats, and/or kill them for food when other sources, such as agriculture, disappear due to extreme weather. And of course Western big game hunters love to take home trophies to prove how manly they are.

The Northern White Rhino recently became extinct.

Endangered African primates include the chimpanzee, the gorilla, the bonobo, and the drill. The cheetah is critically endangered, and lions and leopards are also in a vulnerable state.

Other critically endangered African species include the African penguin, the African wild dog, green turtles, pangolins, and hundreds of species of birds.

For earthweal, where Sherry asks us to consider how humans have changed the African landscape. I’ve used words from the Oracle II list generated by Jane this week.

All the art is from previous posts about endangered species. Interestingly, I only found one other poem written to go along with the images. Perhaps it’s because words are inadequate for me in the face of such a huge loss. It’s easier for me to draw or paint or collage my distress.

This is what we’ve come to

Eric Greitens, a leading contender for the Republican Senate nomination in Missouri, released a new video in which he is depicted as hunting RINOs (Republicans in Name Only).

“I’m Eric Greitens, Navy SEAL, and today we’re going RINO hunting.” Greitens says as he walks down a sidewalk with a gun in hand.

The video cuts to a house where Greitens, surrounded by what looks like a tactical unit, waits by the door. “The RINO feeds on corruption and is marked by the stripes of cowardice,” says Greitens. The unit smashes the door down and throws what looks like a smoke grenade. Greitens strides through the door. “Join the MAGA crew,” he says. “Get a RINO hunting permit. There’s no bagging limit, no tagging limit and it doesn’t expire until we save our country.”—(cnn.com)

nutty?  I
wish it were only
the deranged
ravings of
a single unarmed man—but
it is not fiction

actually
millions are waiting
with their guns–
enchanted
by, and obedient to,
a simplistic lie

sordid words
sprayed like stray bullets,
shattering
sanctity,
all respect for life—the
aftermath is death

Merril was correct when she said the wordlist from Oracle II generated on Sunday by Jane demanded a political response. Reading about Eric Greitens and his campaign ad today sealed it.

The headline haiku art and erasure poem are from my response to the Kick-About prompt a few weeks ago of the art of Basquiat. I painted on a page from the NY Times that interviewed Republican Congress members about their thoughts on gun legislation and listed the amount of money they had received from the NRA. Money talks, and erases the truth.

Guns

do something.  question.
sorry—guns are the problem.
where it starts.  guns.  guns.

A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall

“Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?”
“To market, to market, to buy a big gun.”

we confuse
omniscience and
ignorance,
redundant
in our habitual
failure to protect

we collect
wealth, polluted with
jealousy,
smothered in
waste—we admire and support
incompetence, greed

we spend time
staring at our screens–
glowing with
apathy,
motionless, a shadow of
imminent demise

Jane Dougherty posted some randomly generated words this morning for us to use to make a poem. After seeing “blue-eyed” I could not get Dylan’s song out of my head, and the word “market” provided the reply, mirroring both the news and my continued distress about it.

I struggled to go somewhere else, but ended up with the above depressing and not-very-poetic shadorma chain.

Dylan (as always) says it much better than I.

I’ve stepped in the middle of seven sad forests
I’ve been out in front of a dozen dead oceans
I’ve been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard
And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, and it’s a hard
It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall