Reanimated Lavender Granola Switchblade Nun rides again.

Friday, March 31, 2023

Word Garden Word List--Stephen Dunn

 

Hello. my small cadre of fantastic poets! This week we take our List words from a Pulitzer Prize winning collection by Stephen Dunn entitled Different Hours. Dunn writes of life situations which are quiet and ordinary on the surface and shines a bright light into the depths. His style is unornamented free verse, and yet it is very definitely not prose. Dunn has a deft knack for skirting the edge. If you'd like to read some of his more well-known poems, you can find them HERE. I urge you to do so. 

What we do here is to take at least 3 of the 20 words from the list provided and use them in a new original poem of our own. Then simply link, visit others, and then sink into a deep contemplation of the meaning of existence. And now, your List:

affair
blizzard
cats
clown
coo
Egyptians
episodes
Havana
holidays
knot
motto
narcosis
paper
perpetual
popular
radio
six
suits
weather
zero

Un Recuerdo (A Memory)

 

When I was younger, one of my co-workers
was an older lady, or so she seemed to me.
She was just always there,
a woman who ate at her desk from a clear plastic container--
some sort of salad. 
She was just an ample, 
stationary emplacement 
as permanent as the pyramids.

I thought of her then as something akin
to those funky American clunker cars from the fifties
still rumbling around Havana,
something you'd smile at
but not feel had anything to do with you.
She wore a cross that rested on her bosom,
like the ones that dangle from the mirrors of Cuban taxis. 

She stopped coming to work, though, and someone said she was ill.
"Pancreatic cancer" they told me, sotto voce. 
I knew, as a northerner, that weather can change in an instant.
What I hadn't known is that I am made of weather
blood and bone and breath
breezing through me every second of every day.

I went to see her with some other women from work.
There, in the hospice, she wasn't ample anymore,
just a paper doll watching episodes on tv through a narcotic blizzard.
British adventurers were removing treasures from the tombs
in grainy archive footage
as the knot inside her belly grew and her hand grabbed at nothing. 
"Morphine hallucinations," someone whispered. 

After she died I took one of her cats, a calico I had for several years.
I still think of that day at the hospice, though
and how the clown-devil can sit silently at one's side any time,
like a taxi at the curb, bags already arranged in the trunk.

He will watch whatever you want to watch,
at that wind-down hour.
He never complains, talks over the narrator, or changes the channel,
but though we protest that we were only in the middle, 
I want to see how it ends
he will click it to black, pull into traffic, and say,
"Nada es para siempre, ni siquiera sufrimiento."
__________


The last line says, "Nothing is forever, not even suffering." 

Music: Compay Segundo Chan Chan




Tuesday, March 28, 2023

Naive Art

 The black cat with the golden eyes
hides in the garden
with the broken-necked tulips
in the Spring.

The tulips
in their pink headscarves
will never raise their gaze again--
only their arms
to the blank blue sky.

The black cat with the steady gaze
hides in the garden
fascinated with the dun-colored mourning dove
on the gray sill.

The mourning dove
watches for the speckled hawk
beneath the yellow sun
of April.

Saturday, March 25, 2023

Word Garden Word List--Michael McClure

 

Hello friends! It's a hectic day around here, still messing with trying to effect repairs on my house and whatnot, but I cannot fail you! Today's List is taken from a volume of poems by Michael McClure entitled September Blackberries. You'll forgive me if I am less informative than usual this week, but I urge you to Google Michael McClure to find out more about him!


What we do here is to use at least 3 of the 20 words from the list provided in a new original poem of our own. Then just link up, visit others, and then loudly complain about being busy, so busy! :-p

And now, your List:

age
crowns
experimental
falcon
galaxies
geniuses
globe
gyres
Hades
poet
revolution
sensitivity
sidewalk
softness
sugar
swirls
swoop
tusk
wobbles
wolves

Extra bonus word: "Meat." He uses it repeatedly in this collection, and normally I always include oft-repeated words, but 'meat' just didn't seem very poetic to me. However, you may use it if you like, for meaty extra credit. 

Seven Poets


In Hades seven poets
pasting pips on paper crowns
facedown on the sidewalk
holding seven falcons down
woke to find the sugar vein
clogged by golden tusk
and the Genius of the Galaxies
was just shit out of luck.

When seven poets wobble down
the racetrack of the dawn
riding lazy Sensitivity
like bangers of the gong
who spin in gyres like goblins
whose experiments go wrong
when they trade their tongues for bullshit
then say, "Don't you love my song?"

Seven poets claim the globe
of earth and eye and breast
while their dietetic revolution
starves out all the rest
I pray for wolves and pray for beasts
to pry them from their pens
to strip them of their peacock pose
and show them stunted hens.
_______


also shared with The Sunday Muse #252. Image by Ruven Afanador

Saturday, March 18, 2023

Cottage On The Shore

 

Perhaps we are emotional gypsies
though our bodies become a sailor's cottage on the shore.
The heart, like a child, gets lost in reveries
and though it beats in stationary stasis evermore
it remembers warm July, desire, petrichor.
Let me sleep that I might dream and feel again the wagon's motion,
a scarecrow slinging duffel over shoulder, on to ocean.

_____

This is a rhyme royal. 


Music: Judy Collins Farwell To Tarwathie






Friday, March 17, 2023

Word Garden Word List--Randy Newman

 

Welcome to this week's Word List! This time our source is the well-known songwriter and composer Randy Newman. Newman has written some outrageous songs, satirical songs, and on the other hand, tender love songs. He's probably best known for Short People, the world's most biased view of the vertically challenged, but there is also Yellow Man, which does the same thing for the Chinese. His songs advocate world-wide nuclear disaster (Political Science), marrying a hostile mental defective (Wedding In Cherokee County) or express love for an evident corpse (Lucinda). 




However, he can also break your heart with songs like I Think It's Going To Rain Today, Marie, or Still the Same Girl. He has composed the scores for many famous movies such as The Natural, Paulie, and Monsters Inc. My favorite song of his may be I'm Dead (But I Don't Know It) with the Eagles backing him up as he sings about going on and on and on long after his talent is gone. So you see, he even makes fun of himself as when in another song he tells a woman, "I'm sorry dear, you're too late. I've already ruined my life." And I haven't even mentioned You Can Leave Your Hat On.

What we do here is to use at least 3 of the 20 words provided in a new original poem of our own. Then just link up, visit others, then sit back, relax,  and listen to Randy Newman!

Your List:

beach
boulevard
cats
charming
cigarette
emotional
gypsies
hat
jolly
kangaroo
mirror
overflow
persuade
ruined
sailor
scarecrows
smart-ass
sorry
telephone
yellow