2024 NaPM 25 April

[RiverNotch]

Rules: Write a poem for national poetry month on the topic or form described. Each poem should appear as a separate reply to this thread. The goal is to, at the end of the month have written 30 poems for National Poetry Month.

Describe a genealogy.

[Mark A Becker]

Family Tree

Even in broad daylight
as the kids call for him
from the brand new tire swing
grandaddy won’t go near

……. that gnarled old southern oak

[TranquillityBase]

I don’t care what breeds
combined over the decades
to make Buster into the mutt
he is:  a reddish brown terrier,
black muzzle (graying now)
Fu-Manchu hairs each side of his jaws,
stout, short stubby legs
that make his butt sway
when he walks, just like John Wayne,
seen walking away at the end
of The Searchers.

[Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvfIsbhIQLA]

[dukealien]

Real Deal


It’s twenty-three-card pickup, kid–
you play the hand you’re dealt blind
by your parents, cut and shuffled.

Sure, you can improve it: upgrade
with training, experience,
even (snicker) education.
A sense of humor is
a good flush to develop.

But there are just two suits
of that X-Y joker, pink and blue
(one to a customer)
that you can’t change no matter
what you discard.

So don’t fold: play ‘em
like you got ‘em up until
the bluffs get real.

[RiverNotch]

First there was a woman
who had to play a harlot
in order to achieve

her womanly rights. Then there was a harlot
which, in ancient parlance,
was repentant,

although perhaps her harlotry
had been added to fit the type
of a foreign woman. Following her,

there was this foreign woman
who was undeniably righteous
but her lot was much worse,

in ancient circles, than that of a harlot:
she was a widow. Finally there was a woman
who was perhaps righteous

but her king forced her
first to be a harlot
then to be a widow,

with her king then becoming
an icon of repentance,
her foreign husband rotting,

like her first child, in a grave
long since forgotten, 
her second son becoming

renowned for his wisdom,
and she herself remaining
little more than what's been said.

That no other women
are honoured, at this point,
until the very end,

could be because the author
of this genealogy
was as much an ancient

as the world he lived in,
but the truth, I think,
was if this world had been

just a hair more equal,
the impact of the lesson
at the very end

would surely have been dulled.
In honouring Tradition,
we memorialize the worst

only to reject it
when the time to act arrives:
the Ever-Virgin Mother

and her Son, our Lord,
were brought forth to transform
a world that silenced women,
not to keep it going.

First there was a woman
who had to play a harlot
in order to achieve

her womanly rights. Then there was a harlot
which, in ancient parlance,
was repentant,

although perhaps her harlotry
was added to fit the type
of a foreign woman. Following her,

there was this foreign woman
who was undeniably righteous
but her lot was much worse,

in ancient circles, than a harlot:
she was a widow. Finally there was a woman
who was perhaps righteous

but her king forced her
first to be a harlot
then to be a widow,

with her king then becoming
an icon of repentance
and their second son, renowned

for his wealth and wisdom,
and she herself
little more than what's been said.

That no other women
are honoured, at this point,
until the very end,

could be because the author
of this pedigree
was as much an ancient

as the world he lived in,
but the truth, I think, 
was if this world had been

just a hair more equal,
the impact of the lesson
at the very end

would surely have been dulled.
In honouring Tradition,
we memorialize the worst

only to reject it
when the time to act arrives:
the Ever-Virgin Mother

and her Son, our Lord,
were brought forth to transform
a world that silenced women,
not to keep it going.

[Wjames]

The first cell became a man
after several billion years
of lust.

First for itself,
then for one self
it secreted, until the selves
had warped in branches
of birch and teeth
eating other cells
and shitting them out.

[busker]

You are a pig,
Andrewsarchus.
A boar is better.
It doesn’t bite off its fetters
like it’s a trifling matter.
O, fabled beast of the middle Eocene,
though your table manners were horrid
your mating no blur lurid
but a drawn out bestial scene,
we made your likeness de-extincted,
with VC money flown unstinted -
because it’s there, as Mallory hinted,
we’ll make the Holocene
a beautiful panorama,
a live diorama,
of all the ages of the earth.
Not just fill pages on the birth
of disappeared species
known from their feces
and from their bone,
but plant a beast in every home.