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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.
This year, there are no form requirements, only "tiers" or "rankings" given informally to all participants:
Bronze Tier: Participate at least once.
Silver Tier: Participate all days.
Gold Tier: Participate all days,
and have all entries be the same form
or have all entries be different forms.
Write a poem involving
a hermitage. The four hermitages I can think of at the moment, which you could use as a point of reference, are:
- the various huts and other places of solitude across Egypt, Palestine, and Mount Athos;
- the depressing little hermitage at the end of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, or more generally the ornamental hermitages of 18th century country estates;
- the St. Petersburg Hermitage, where Catherine the Great collected art;
- and the Nashville Hermitage, where Andrew Jackson collected slaves.
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Sound of Zither
So
after Red
Guards exterminated
China’s traditional mountain-
dwelling hermits
the Party reinstated
them as a sort of
care-takers, reenactors
for the sake of
tourism, culture
and so forth. They are
otherwise free to
pray and meditate
unlike young Chinese whom
the Party criticizes for
“lying prone.”
Young wind-gnarled pines
sprout amid rocks
and severed
roots.
[Form: Shape poem]
Non-practicing atheist
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Joined: Nov 2013
04-13-2025, 05:42 AM
(This post was last modified: 04-16-2025, 01:20 PM by RiverNotch.)
What passes for a yard across this hill
is concrete and hibiscus, sometimes also
a dog or two chained up, a bowl for stray
cats by which all the local flocks have been
thinned---my mother remembers chico trees
teeming with colasisis, my grandmother
the skies nearly invisible, this hill
was jungle until Magellan, an orchard
until Marcos---what passes for a home
where everything's concrete and steel, the nearby
convent reduced to a hermitage, even
the megachurches sucking up its donors
reduced to rostra for various campaigning
cats, the children of colonizers, cops?
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We sometimes would poke fun
at him for living there, as he shunned
life like a hermit, outside the usual run
of things. But his place back then
was a landing spot for many of us when
our lives took unexpected bends. On Gum
Springs Road, where brothers and friends
stayed at Willy's Home for Wayward Men.
We've all moved on to start anew,
though some were lost along the way.
His old street is now renamed, and new
houses have replaced his timeless place.
I wonder if anyone who lives there now
can see where we left a trace.
Form: semi-Italian sonnet
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Joined: Dec 2017
Bright star, like nature's eremite,
Keats said, then hardly twenty six
was dead. And none would ever write
like him again. In tourist pics
you see his house in Hampstead heath,
a tree that held a nightingale,
and where perhaps his restless feet
were pacing after red tell-tale
drops fell on a handkerchief.
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Joined: Nov 2015
(04-13-2025, 10:03 PM)busker Wrote: Bright star, like nature's eremite,
Keats said, then hardly twenty six
was dead. And none would ever write
like him again. In tourist pics
you see his house in Hampstead heath,
a tree that held a nightingale,
and where perhaps his restless feet
were pacing after red tell-tale
drops fell on a handkerchief.
This is particularly beautiful. Congratulations!
Non-practicing atheist
Posts: 438
Threads: 374
Joined: Sep 2014
Cave
Holy roller
your time has not yet come
it's passed—
that rainbow that one
your feigned Commerce
sets pixels to peace
in installments
Aristophanes, I am satanic your atheism
I know you believe in gods