A moment of celebration
raise your hands, wave the palms
Palms together, clap your hands,
No palmistry to understand
when they raise you up
they’ll drop you down.
Get ready to sup and pray some.
Silver’s exchanged for a soul
just thirty little pieces.
The whole world pivots around
this moment of celebration,
before the coming devastation.
But after grief,
Relief. and
Peace.
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A little Palm Sunday poem for you.
The music echoes through her bones
throbbing heart beat,
quivering quavers,
filling feet with rhythm.
Eyes scanning for possibilities,
Whose arms will encircle her?
Will he be the one to enfold her,
entwine their bodies,
make her sway
under his percussion?
She watches and wonders,
Shall she dance?
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.
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(Inspired by Richard Gere and Jennifer Lopez tonight)
Little horns of sunshine
exclaiming on my table,
‘Daffodils mean spring!’
There was no way to stay.
Whatever choice was made
was bound to be wrong,
because this song we create
requires we pay again and again
for our harmonic
dissonance.
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Still reading Jodi Picoult’s Mercy. Do you write poems for the characters you read about?
Do not leave him unsupervised,
For those flames in his eyes
are burning for the stranger
he’s been dreaming of.
Leave him unsupervised
to throw away your history.
If his eyes burn for her,
he doesn’t deserve your
unswerving devotion.
Reading Jodi Picoult’s novel Mercy. Feel like screaming, so I wrote a poem.
On her blog @SarahDoughty prompted:
Tell me a story covering three things:
This was my response. Not exactly a story, but you know, brevity is an art! 🙂 What’s your response? Go check out her blog and leave a thought.
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POETRY LESSON:
I feel like I need to take this moment to point out what is going on in this poem, because while there are only 3 lines and eleven words, they are woven tightly using a variety of poetic technique. First, while each line responds in order to Sarah’s 3 prompts, they also read as one sentence, so there are overlapping meanings. Secondly, there is a pattern of 4-3-4 words. Thirdly, repetition in the first line is quite emphatic, but provides a rhyme that tightens the ending with you.
Fourthly, I get seriously carried away with the sound devices assonance and consonance, binding each component of the words to their fellows. There are three vowels sounds repeated, the only out-lier is the ‘o’ in stories. e.g. I, I, my; do, do, you; release, stories, dreams; the, of. (Reminder: assonance is repetition of a vowel sound, NOT a letter). The consonant sounds also repeat with do, do, dreams; release, stories, dreams; release, stories, dreams; my dreams. The the and of are both *fricatives, and so while not exactly the same sound, the brain hears them as ‘close enough.’
Finally, that leaves only the ‘l’ is without a partner, except visually–because I,I,l look the same, don’t they? And of course, the lonely o from stories, visually matches the o’s in do. In other words, every component of each word is tied somehow to the rest of the poem. Absolutely everything fits like a tight puzzle.
Did I do any of this intentionally? No, actually. I just responded to the prompt, tidied it up until I liked it, and then when I copied it here, I noticed how tight it was.
*Fricatives in English are f,v, s (both s/z sounds), th (both θ and ð).
It’s time for spring cleaning,
but if I wash your nose prints
off this glass
then the last trace
of you will be erased
and you will truly be
gone.
The label on the bra
reads “Keep away from fire.”
Is this a warning against
flames of excessive passion,
self-immolation, or
metaphorical representations
of feminist independence?
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We’re home, and it’s raining.
Vacation sun hidden
Blue skies masked by grey
I didn’t ask you to say
anything. I waited.
Too late.
We’re home, and it’s raining.
I didn’t mean to do it.
The clerk was trying to teach me to do something for myself
but I had neither time nor inclination.
I just wanted a book, and if the one I had requested from the other campus wasn’t there,
it didn’t matter where it was in the system
or whether it was coming.
Today I could pick it up, not tomorrow or later.
It wasn’t here, so I just wanted to sign out the book in my hand.
When she tried to explain what I should do to trace the path of the missing book
explain the complex library system, invite me to log into a computer off to the side,
I gave her the look.
I didn’t mean to, but I did.
She froze and her sentence stuttered to a halt,
eyes gaping at me.
She passed my book over the scanner, gulping.
I apologized for not being teachable.
I don’t know where I developed the look,
I don’t realize I’m doing it until I see the reaction.
I don’t know what I’m doing precisely
that conveys such intense disinterest and disapproval
but it does.
At least I didn’t have to sit for ten minutes
for a lecture and computer consultation, like she wanted.
Three minutes in the university library was long enough
when I am hobbling with a cane
and irritated with accessibility.
Shawn L. Bird 