NaPM April 24, 2017

[Todd]

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. 


Topic 24: Write a poem inspired by a line from a famous poem.

Line requirements: 8 lines or more

[Lizzie]

Tongue In Cheek

When you say you eat men like air...
does one really eat air? Supermodels try,
to be sure, but sensible people think
masticating something nonexistent
is just not worth the bother
of a philosophical conundrum.

Or was air there to rhyme with there?
You could have said, I eat men like hair –
at least men are hairy.
It would have made a kind of raunchy,
roundabout sense.

Or did you mean that you eat men
like the smog of Los Angeles and Mexico City
slowly constricts its inhabitants?
You would have to mean men
in the old fashioned sense, and then
you'd be a baby strangler.
Infanticidal cannibals
don't win Pulitzer's.

So, sort the ambiguity please –
some of your fans have ridiculous minds.

[just mercedes]

Malala



Malala blogged the truth. They hated that,
her words made fools of local Taliban,
while overseas, important bureaucrats
supported her, and her outspoken stand.

A teenage girl falls victim to a plot
to close her school, so ignorance can reign.
A bullet in the head, a brutal shot.
Assassination, if you say it plain.

But Allah intervened; Malala lived,
recovered, found a way to reach out far,
spoke louder still, gave all she had to give
for schools for girls, this saint with battle scar.

When heroines are forged from circumstance,
how can we know the dancer from the dance?




Final line is a quote from W.B.Yeats poem 'Among School Children'

[CRNDLSM]

Our love is like a flower in the dirt.
The sun is time and effort we invest,
and insects eating leaves are like a test,
because relationships will have to hurt.
The rain is conversation building trust.
We'll just as quickly drown drinking too much,
as not enough we'll wither at a touch,
can we convert and overcome our lust?

The nutrients we digest with our shoots
might help feed parasites along the stem,
and even though you nor I can stop them,
it's natural. Our strength is in our roots.

How can something small have so much power?
In this way our love is like a flower


('Which is like love, which is like everything' "Wedding" Alice Oswald, seemed like the path of least resistance)

[Todd]

The Gospel According to George Romero

“I am not there. I do not sleep.” –Mary Elizabeth Frye (Do Not Stand At My Grave And Weep)

No one sleeps the long night.
It is the hunger
that brings us back.
The lesson of the worms,
who have mouths
but use no words. Chewing
is the way of the night flesh.
When we eat your brains
we remember
the sunrise and who
we were.
We like you
look back.

[kolemath]

HOLD UP ONE SECOND

I know whose woods these are.
He's not around here though
and won't see me daydreaming.

My horse is all like,
"Why the hell did we stop?
It's cold and dark!"

So he starts shaking his bells,
and the wind blows.

It's nice wasting time out here,
but I got shit to take care of,
so let's go horse.
Here we go.

[Donald Q.]

Hangover

Venomous wort rot. Head hears air horn noise.
Vino ire and rum-soot toot a tenor.
Lout lotion moonlit alone on the levee...
Me, a new moron unsolved in turmoil.
 
Tonnes of onions woven into a twelve
ovum omelette, an idiot diet,
aid sin removal , mute the loud sun and
oust seventeen rhinos who melee
melon. Snout it down. Reorient me.
 
Noon vomit, demon mouth humour. Oh woe.
Read moist towel vows, swear down I moot return
to rote event, no more retelevised
rave, sad trout nonvoter rooted in time.
I invent new motto, adhere to;
we must love one another or die.

[dukealien]

Hidden in Light

In light inaccessible hid from our eyes

          - Walter Chalmers Smith (d. 1908)

We cannot know what passes
within a beam of light
or, indeed, aught about it
‘til its photons impact and affect
some matter we perceive -
dust motes, stage curtains,
cells of retinas.

In its way light is
imperceptible, inaccessible
as time: we cannot sense its passage
without instruments, materials
light and time attrit
by rust, uncurling springs
body tanned, nerves triggered...
inner light, like time
an independent variable.

At light’s insurmountable velocity
from its point of view
nothing changes, no time passes.
So we believe...
does this seem likely?
All that tensed, furious
leonine illumination
frozen as if dead because
it’s hidden from our eyes?

[Todd]

Hidden in Light

In light inaccessible hid from our eyes

          - Walter Chalmers Smith (d. 1908)

We cannot know what passes
within a beam of light
or, indeed, aught about it
‘til its photons impact and affect
some matter we perceive -
dust motes, stage curtains,
cells of retinas.

In its way light is
imperceptible, inaccessible
as time: we cannot sense its passage
without instruments, materials
light and time attrit
by rust, uncurling springs
body tanned, nerves triggered...
inner light, like time
an independent variable.

At light’s insurmountable velocity
from its point of view
nothing changes, no time passes.
So we believe...
does this seem likely?
All that tensed, furious
leonine illumination
frozen as if dead because
it’s hidden from our eyes?

I love your first two lines, and I'm a fan of the Hymn. I've always liked the ones that emphasize light (i.e., Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence, etc)

[dukealien]

I love your first two lines, and I'm a fan of the Hymn. I've always liked the ones that emphasize light (i.e., Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence, etc)

My personal favorite along those lines, for both its dual meaning and the magnificent finale, is Handel's "His yoke is easy and his burden is light."

[Keith]

Ella Wheeler Wicox-Loves Language

How does love speak?
In the fait flush of a telltale cheek

its hush can touch a slight of hand.
Stands still in feet of sinking sand
Despite the light that's only found
on nights when oceans surely drown.
It tumbles out in foreign tonuges
a song and all that's owed is paid
with words that once had time to play.
And if all silence comes to fall
a seated bond were no voice calls
then what of love should poets speak
If not of flushed past telltale cheeks.

[Todd]

I enjoyed that, Keith. Especially: "on nights when oceans surely drown"

[Keith]

I enjoyed that, Keith. Especially: "on nights when oceans surely drown"

Thank you Todd, I've been playing catch up today so I should probably leave it at four poems, my thought are thinning, many thanks for keeping all this going and the encouragement. Your prompts have been great. Best Keith

[Todd]

I enjoyed that, Keith. Especially: "on nights when oceans surely drown"

Thank you Todd, I've been playing catch up today so I should probably leave it at four poems, my thought are thinning, many thanks for keeping all this going and the encouragement. Your prompts have been great. Best Keith

Thanks. I had to play catch up myself, so I can relate. Four was my limit in a day too. I've felt a bit mentally thin all month. 

[nibbed]

*Sigh*

Five seconds
I have dreamed
turned into
at least a year
not chaos-like
together crushed
and bruised
but only as wonderful
as those five seconds
when you turned
into my beautiful dream

[rayheinrich]

                           


                                it's me
                                i'm earth awaiting rain then waking in a new spring haze
                               
                                a window luminous
                                a crooked pane of glass to see through and a sycamore to see
                               
                                i hear fresh sound that's
                                where it shouldn't be
                                it's somewhere here
                                or was it dreamt
                                or maybe it's just waiting with the rain that smells about to come
                               
                                one foot inside the other
                                luckily it's just my shoe
                                and not my mouth confusing what i said with what it can't
                               
                                a foot within a shoe
                                a door within a frame
                                and there's that sound again that isn't just remembered
                               
                                crooked glass
                                and morning dove
                                a voice that drifts
                                out from a dream
                                these are the only past i have
                               
                                it's me
                               
                                i'm earth awaiting rain
                                then waking





Inspiration comes from the line with "sycamore" in it from this poem here.

[Tracy Mitchell]

 Driving to Town for Groceries

Sun sweeps a pioneer cemetery
on the right side of the road up ahead–
vacant, like a place that once was sacred.

I think of who the seven graves may hold.
My great, great uncle, two infant girls and
four persons from the farm site next over.

The grove behind holds broken tangled limbs.
Twisted knots and knuckles from the right view
seem like human features and gray faces.

My dog leans on his front paws on the dash
watches a flock of Canadian geese
on the receding ice of a field lake.

Deer will be on the move again at dusk.
The northern plains are starting to warm.
There is music when there is nothing else.

[Lizzie]

^ Gorgeous. Love the last line.

[RiverNotch]

Sheba and the King


under the waxing moon we
not me and you
were on, beneath the branches rustling
the wings of bats and owls

and shadow-jumping one to two
from fruit to fruit, from hunger to hunger
out of the new and young and into
the wild and wizen-eyed

where wolves were not but tales of Christ
who long ago declared
the only worthy wife was His,

such that in red of ages we
even his sun and second father should
not, but me and you