Day Six

I've fallen behind.  A novovirus arrived unexpectedly (is it ever expected?), and now I have several days to catch up - if they allow such a thing.  Well, who's to disallow it?  Also, I've decided to stop following the prompts for the most part.  So, there!

Waking in the dark, hearing

rain playing on the roof
hours before dawn.

Luxury.

Day Five

The prompt is Opening Day, if not baseball, any sport.  If not a sport, the first day of summer, perhaps, or a new adventure.


she is beautiful
she squeezes her eyes and yawns
ah, she's clever too 

Now comes the Blues

napowrimo – today comes the 12-bar blues poem.  I love blues – have thought often about how the music genre could slip into a poetry genre.  This is a crude try, forgive me:

Reality Blues

Not gonna watch Reality TV no more

Not gonna watch Reality TV no more

It’s way too scary for me

Not gonna watch Survival TV no more

Not gonna watch Survival TV no more

It’s way too real for me

Not gonna watch survival games no more

Not gonna watch reality games no more

those hunger games got me scared

   for us  for us   

Day Three

We were asked to write an epithalamium, a poem to the bride on her wedding day.  I can't do that, try as I may. It always starts out something like "Hail sacrificial virgin as you tread the aisle to your altar..."  My parents had a better marriage, and their experience inspired this poem - which is not an epithalamium, nor does it mock one, as much.


Our Scary Family Album 

Here’s my mother 
just graduated, looking 
into the lens suspiciously,
her starched nurse’s cap 
impossibly perched. 

This is my father astride 
his Harley, booted right foot 
asserting the dirt road,
goggles posed in his wild hair,
his grin naughty. 
A gorgeous man before he had us. 

NaPoWriMo - Day 2

The prompt today is to use in some manner either a song popular on the year of one's birth, or the first popular song sung as a child.

Childhood Memories are Not True, They Say (How Can That Be So?)

I see myself as a gleeful girlie

polite and gentle, hair all curly

in dresses pink and frilly,    

singing a-tisket a-tasket

a green and yellow basket

I bought a basket for my mommie

on the way I dropped it

I dropped it, I dropped it

as I happily play dainty games

careful of my shiny Mary Janes.

Well, maybe I wasn't truckin' on down 

the avenue in quite that fashion,

perhaps less polite, more passion!

Mouthy, bossy, a smarty pants

ever in thorny thickets of banter,

a frisky snippet, head in a book,

knees skinned, a disheveled look.

Poor mommie, I dropped more than her basket,

I changed her tisket and her tasket.

(Wish I could tell her I know

But, it’s too late now.)

  

The return of NaPoWriMo

Can't imagine a better reason to reactivate my poetry blog.  I'll be using the NaPoWriMo prompts posted at the national website http://napowrimo.net  I 'm going to try, once again, to post a  new poem every day for the month of April - National Poetry Month, of course!  The first prompt is a carpe diem poem after the fashion of Andrew Marvell, or not.


Pluck the Day

Carpe diem they tell us, but I’d rather pluck

each day as a single rose, a surprise

growing on my doorstep, and be amazed

at its impossible layering -  soft, predictable,

mysterious. And its pain.  That thorn

is always present in wierd places. 

It hurts.  You bleed.  Did you know there is no

redemption? Suppose you can never have
what you cherish most?
If you pretend
there is no thorn and joyfully pluck each day,

you can live without ever being forgiven,
exist without being loved.
You cannot survive without beauty.
Pluck.

What Shall Be Done About Books?

I love books.  I have 13 bookcases in my small apartment, crammed full.  More books piled on the floor, here and there.  I love books. Can't bear to part from those I especially love.  I also have books on my iPad, in iBooks and Kindle. Point is - more of us who love to read are going toward ebooks.  We lack storage space to shelve the books we love, the new ones we discover. Instead, we download them all, title by title, into our mobile devices.  


What is the future, then, of books?  Will they become museum relics?  Will  libraries become museums; will print publishers of books go bankrupt?  Does this matter to us?  If books are important to us, we need to do what we can, now, to preserve their significance.