The Poetry Marathon

She is writing her self-portrait

Rolling words within her mouth
Like the finely pointed tip of a brush
Its camel bristles viridian green
While the broader brush beside it
Glistens with a simpler blue
Simple as mountain air is simple
Blue with the evening damp
A thin mist of blue and grey
And the promise of evening rain
Not simple at all, really

The lines she hopes will sing
Quiver like the strings
Of the untuned harp in the corner
That still holds the memory
Of music within tensile wires
Hum in sympathy to colours and textures
Palette knife and finger
Stone and rag and bone
She knows she must include

How will she draw the rivers
She wonders
The earthy Mekong brown
The silverine of the Chao Phraya
The red clay of the Arkansas
The chatoyance of this newest friend
For now, she is an island
in a confluence of waters
How their currents fed her from wide beds
How she moved over and through
Their slick finned stories

It is more than hesitating brush and ink
Are able in her faltering hand
To render
The cacaphony that masquerades
As her name, her face
How it changes colours
As the rivers widen shorten deepen
Each a note on a staff in a lyric
That needs more music to move
As the wind does As the birds do
As she did each year of her fragmented childhood
In arcs of bright morning light
In swooping loops of flight
In the scalloped surfaces of rivers
That might as well be her own blood
Circling in pulsing rhythm
Her faceless homeless heart

Poem #1
Earth, Wind, Fire, & Water prompt

After the apocalypse ~

He said he preferred fire.
I’m going with ice
water’s sturdier cousin
A diamante shroud
Glittering & proud
Of its crystalline structure
Buried in the frozen earth
I will survive like mammoths
Surfacing to light and air
Only æons after
When the pale green sky
Is streaked with fire
And rain weeps
From the scarlet clouds
And nothing else remains

Hi all ~

This will be my fourth marathon, although last year’s was a bust due to a serious family illness. I had to drop out before I really started. I was sooo disappointed.

This year, I’m settled in a new state, in a new chapter of my life. I’ve been a writer of one sort or another all my life — primarily poetry, but I also write non-fiction. I’ve published both, as well as journalism & academic writing. My work background is as eclectic as my writing: journalism, academia, the arts & humanities. Writing has been a doorway for me into all kinds of places & jobs.

My plan for this marathon (actually half-marathon; I do not function well on no sleep) is to just do the prompts. What I found in years 1 & 2 was that I just had to trust the process. Oh — and have a LOT of good coffee and/or Thai iced tea to help keep me going!

Here’s to poets, and their brilliantly coloured voices!

I was late for motherhood
the appointment was in a neighbourhood
I didn’t know      hidden behind billboards
and bare-limbed trees
for years I drove the highways
but the map given me at childhood
was missing pieces
like a puzzle where someone stole
all the blue edges

I had to ask directions
the doctor made me pass a test
I flunked the first time
later he would help me study
prescribe me vitamins
tell me not to worry things would work
out
I tried to follow his car to where
I thought I should be

you weren’t certain you wanted to live
there in that toy-strewn house
where the large windows first beckoned
at night I would dream of infants
and their tiny whispernames
in the darkness just before light broke
I would drive myself to where
the babies might be
that rendezvous I always meant to keep

it would be years later
when two boys became men
that I would remember
how it felt to be unfinished
lacking
missing those blue pieces
and realize
it was never about motherhood

I come from suitcases
from generations (three) of packing tape
lately book boxes from UTotem
filled with the detritus of a dissertation
Each move a chance to clean house
begin a new life unencumbered
a nautilus w/out her chambered shell
I am throwing away my childhood
the early years of love & marriage
stitched into linens from Hong Kong
teapots from Korea
and bronzeware from another life
Flipping to another page within a book
I haven’t written yet
the story of a woman and a man
and someone else’s baby
I tell myself:
It’s only one more time
One more house to make a home
One more map to learn
And one more utter dislocation
You’d think I would adapt
but something there is that doesn’t love
this kind of change
the suitcases the boxes the move
the goodbyes and the distances
that feel a bit like deaths
and send me in to mourning

even the opening chords were wrong
those plaintive just awakened half diminished
scales     flat in all the wrong places

the day grew only more dischordant
as if the better players in the orchestra
deserted me left only a tuba and a violin

there once had been a melody
a kind of score written on old paper
the quarter notes black the half notes hollow

but today the hours stumbled like beginning
dancers trying to keep time their minute feet
unskilled and all the music off-key

so that the approaching darkness of night
comes welcome even with the fear
of its attendant nightmares

the atonal scale descends and the chords
break into arpeggios with spaces in togetherness
there will be music once again

In the very beginning there weren’t words.
There was the swirl of constellations without names.
There was fire and ice and the elemental signatures of metals.
There was no one to notice or care.

Somewhere time comes into it, although no one can explain it.
When does time start? Is it back w/ the very beginning? Before the words?
Is it after the clash of gases?
When does what never was become what is?

And time passes, because now we have time.
We have a thread w/ the pearls of moments hung upon it
and we call that pastpresentfuture.
And there is still no one to notice or to care.

But later (as time goes, much later) the people
w/ their troublesome words and names come.
And that may be when it all begins, really. With people.
Troublesome words and names. And time.

we need more bombs
more incendiary devices of the verbal kind
we need the righteous anger
of my well-spent youth
cranking handbills on handpresses

we need the fervent furor of the zealot
who will fight the good fight
no one seems to care about
in Baltimore in Ferguson in McKinney
we need more passion more rage

we need this for the righteous
for the broken-hearted idealists
whose hells are paved
with others good intentions
we need for them to rally

Buddhists say to let these attachments go
to leave behind desire for what is not
and yet     engaged Buddhism
we need engaged Buddhists
we need compassionate anger

we need more bombs

What I will remember

The fisted curl of an infant’s transparent fingers
How rosebuds involute as tightly
Waves cresting breaking falling cresting again
A carpet of snow clouds beneath a plane’s wings
Sunlight shafting through the silver of rain
My mother   silent in the pale silk of her coffin

I hate it when the month is mad at me
Furious February, Antagonistic April
Months when days spiral into darkness
even before dusk
when the pileup of wreckage serves
only to hide the carnage of failure
of every time I tried & tried again
and fell over the cliff
into desperation
It might be August
heat shimmering
and I flinch from the icy barb
of knowing I’m inadequate
to anything & everything
this month will bring
Its four weeks huddle
lay plans to tangle me in snarls
of barbed wire that once were words
my beloved offered me in anger
They draw maps of the places in my own
dark centre that are vulnerable
to light places that need secrecy
to survive
The 30 days of June conspire
whisper to the ruins of my May
that now will be no better
And I have done nothing
nothing to ignite this retribution
nothing to deserve this streak
of anger
I have done nothing at all