Day 8 Stupidly

I am so stupidly happy

from @SylviaPlathbot

We are so stupidly happy

...We are so amazed at seeing a blue sky

daffodils mocking our multiple red hearts

We are peering like starved prisoners at one bright hawthorn leaf

and jailing our own precipices to keep from falling

We look through a telescope at children dying to go to school

and parents temper their own workloads...

Actually yesterday's prompt from the NaPoWriMo website but the Poetry Police don't scare me nowadays...

Day 7 Bugs and chocolate

 

Food of the gods

theobroma cacao

In the easterly direction you were traded,

slaves to our addiction; grow full-bellied

from a trunk. An all-season pod

felled by a long-poled knife at a stroke...

Breakfast (C-19) chats on Twitter again, and a video from Emily Nelson at Leeds Museums and Galleries about cocoa production. Which led me to explore more here and there to start writing a poem that is very much based on science facts.

Day 6 after Andrew Marvell

Sonnet seem to be my default form. Today's first draft.

If I had sage enough and thyme

the dandelion would be no crime.

If I scoured the sky, laid waste to meat

a red kite with silent curving wings displayed,

who lorded over a broad estate

then foxglove, bittercress, wild saxifrage

would root and tumble, privileged.

If I could only let the onions grow

and not be always wielding hoe

or spine-deriding, bending low.

There’s memories going back in time

of blowing clocks, of daisy chains

and mum with fork in summertime

rooting out those lawless dandelions.

Day 5 "Almost, at times, the fool"...

... from Prufrock, referred to today in today's prompt.

This turned out to be less productive than I had expected. When I'm in a room with other poets working from the same prompts and talking about it, then it's better. Stuck in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic there's no choice. Zoom-ing is an alternative but certainly not the same. So here are some of the phrases I came up with. Judge for yourself whether they make a poem:

Strawberries are such gossips
Carol Ann couldn't possibly write my shopping list
that's when bridges collapse
when clowns perform the students pass their exams
nine red kites will ruffle the sky
and rabbits disappear into the warren under Turing's guidance.

Days 2 and 3 after digi-problems

Starfish figured yesterday after this fascinating and informative video from Emily at Leeds Museums and Galleries

I didn't post yesterday due to problems actually getting on to this blog :(

Today's draft offering on the theme of Dream:

Are we really still, here?

Inside the plane, silent like church

before the sermon.

In the yellow light someone

speaks without ...

This really does need more work!  

As does my drawing of the starfish - but not by me.  I can safely say that I do not have a career in art.

2020 Day 1 National Poetry Writing Month

Dear readers - are you still there?
It's been two years since we met here and I have been very busy writing, just changed my loyalties to Facebook, and Twitter @moiragauthor
Perhaps it's these times of global Covid-19 that has driven/provoked me back to my own blog. I wish you all well, stay safe social distancing, washing hands like demons.

So here is a sample of the writing I've done this morning.  This is not an April fool.

from An invitation to the red kite

...I will portion however many crows for you

you can return then unhindered

painting rusty red        white patches             bent wings against breathless clouds...

I took my prompt from Jo Bell's A year of poetry-writing prompts (Nine Arches Press)

Junk days

Junk at Castle Peak,
Hong Kong c. 1961

I knew my first publication had been at secondary school. One of my schools - there were four between the ages of 11 and 18 - was the British Army run school, St. George's, in colonial Hong Kong, 1961-64, in my early teens. Thanks to social media, and John Sings, who had a copy of the relevant Georgian Chronicles, I now have my own copies of the two pieces that were accepted into the school magazine.

Below is the first one, written when I was 14 or 15. My imagination obviously went back to the days I had spent in UK winters, though I have no recollection at all of writing it.  I suspect it was written in response to press reports of the 1962-3 harsh UK winter ...

... and reads almost like a traditional fairy tale.  Enjoy!

railway maps and alcohol

Sentimentality is one I always try to avoid so trusting that I've done that in this poem published by Algebra of Owls today. Originally saw the light of day in a version I shared on the Poetry School Campus forum for NaPoWriMo 2017 - a lively and supportive space to share your own poetry, and comment on others brave enough to share.

*****


Languishing in my digital attic are a lot of poetic cartons. Conscious that no one else will rummage around I've recently started to sort them, throw lines (even chunks!) out and rescue others. Once I've exposed them to daylight some have kindly been taken up and published. 

Smith/Doorstop, the publication arm of the Poetry Business are launching One for the Road anthology in various places and is available in selected Waterstones. A very varied selection of poems on the pubs theme.  Delighted to report my The Cardigan Arms is amongst them.

LOVE LETTER

A couple of days when I didn't manage to post for NaPoWriMo but today's prompt was very interesting: to take a line out of each of the 28 days' poems and re-make into a new poem. This, apparently, is a cento. A really good way to review what has been done, but quite a task to re-create, involving printing out all the poems into one document, then pencilling numbers on to lines, and lastly considering the order.  Phew! 

Here's the first stanza of the end result:

LOVE LETTER

Please do tell me what you think.

I am looking for the whys and wherefores

how our bodies were not our own

smiling eyes and all,

like the others who are that way disposed,

it is a lie that the angels are going to surrender...

Dead set

If you haven't realised from reading this, the Poetry School prompt 

was to use the same word at the end of every line.  I dived straight 

into this and hacked away at it ...

DEAD

Where I live it’s not considered polite to talk about the dead

in a way that disparages them or mention that they weren’t dead

good at being neighbourly. When the battery is dead

on your phone you do talk about it, that awful dead

silence means you lose any communication, rather like the dead

of night when you seem to be the only one awake, you are in the dead

centre of a vacuum and there’s nothing you are dead

sure about except...

Later on in the poem I mention a collection I've recently been re-reading, shown in the photo above, published by Cinnamon Press.  I like all the poems in Talking with the Dead  (one review here) but my two favourites have to be Ghandi visits Cafe Nero, Boar Lane, Leeds - one I wish I could have written - and Angel, an ekphrastic poem on the very noticeable and fantastic metal sculpture 'The Angel of the North', by Antony Gormley, in the North East of England. I love his work, including the Angel, but also 'Another Place' at Crosby Beach near Liverpool.  I have not yet managed to actually visit this but, inspired by it, I have written a poem, Digging and Diving, which won a competition back in December 2015. Details here on my blog.