24 Poems ~ 24 Hours
I am a writer and poet, parent, former high school English teacher and current Graduate Teaching Fellow in the Professional Writing and Communications Program at UMass Dartmouth. I founded and facilitate the Horizon Glass Poetry group in New Bedford, MA. I love the ocean, jazz, nature, and studying Aikido at SouthCoast Aikido in Dartmouth, MA.
Hour 3: Aikido: a series of haiku for The Art of Peace
Aikido spirit,
the art of peace in chaos
for a world gone mad
Drawing up from earth
energy winds the body
taking out the slack
Hold the sword, extend
from your center, hips are square
body makes the cut
Spinning the fire
a powerful spirit moves
you beyond violence
Grabbing smoke, vanish
to fight is to lose your own
Aikido spirit
Hour 2: Ringing the Bell at Church
Sitting in silence as the bell rings.
Memories not my own.
Four minutes for Floyd.
Four minutes for 400 years of slavery
in America.
Its echo shakes loose tears for the suffering and oppression—
their story and the story of my own people.
The bell rings by the hands of all the ages
by the growing brown hands of my sons
the Jew and Friend
Christian and Witch.
It hardly seems long enough
as muscles burn on the rope.
Over and over and over
the bell rings.
Listen
Listen
LISTEN
A message too often silenced
with the privilege to forget.
Hour 1: The Music is Enough
Riding the Coltrane highway through an almost midnight snow,
driving with you
into an inked-out sky laced
with snow, its blanketing white beauty
potentially fatal
when the head is turned.
The dim dashboard lights barely skim
your face in my peripheral vision.
Open closed, your eyes see
other times
other places
their faces
pounding the blacks and blues
out of their souls.
A sigh.
A low hum of appreciation punctuates the night
rhythmic interruptions of my struggle
to translate an aural narrative
played in a language I don’t speak.
Framed by silence between us,
the music is enough.
I don’t know if people post a lot of things on here that are not related to poetry, but I’m trying to journal the whole experience. Today I started a new notebook for the marathon and planned a tentative list of what my poetry goal will be for each hour. I’ve collected poetry scraps from my other notebooks that were just waiting for the right time (or really any time as a single parent home during COVID) and Saturday is the time.
I’m curious about how other people prepare or if they just jump right in. Do you use the time to revise drafts? Do you look out the window and just go? Do you stay in one place the whole time or do you move about and write in all places inside and out?
This is the first time I have done the Poetry Marathon, well half marathon. An old friend from college shared the link and suggested I go for it. I have been struggling to write since COVID-19 closed the schools and both kids are home 24/7. My brain is literally too tired for words by the time they go to bed. I decided to do the half marathon and give myself the give and goal of writing poetry. As the founder and facilitator of a poetry group in New Bedford, MA, I also want to inspire my group members. I could write an entire bio here and give all the little details of my life, but what is really most important is that I recapture all the poems I’ve lost from my head because I didn’t take the time.