The Poetry Marathon

Stripped

the divide

Between

Life~

and murder

Is palpable

 

In a land

That’s been

My home

 

My heart broke

When my child spoke

 

In the land of the free

My rights

were just stripped

Of me

 

the right to choose

should ALWAYS be

 

 

Hour 4: Cressida

In my 20s

I roared

when I found out

how much I didn’t know

about the body I was born into

and the tricks of contortion

I’d learned to fit inside

assembly line boxes

made to my measurements

 

Who measures the men?

A hundred years before,

so reticent to end

the long suffering

of (some) women

looking to choose

and catch a deep breath

from the diaphragm

 

These days

deep breathing only goes so far

when so much is at risk

Are we—

the women,

the queer ones,

the boxless ones—

all some cursed Cressida?

Sentenced to float downriver

in a little boat

for jilted Troilus’ amusement

without a paddle to Roe

 

 

 

Grandpa Lafayette

Prompts for the Fourth Hour

Grandpa Lafayette

~willjxn~

My father’s Dad was born to life

In 1876.

The era of Monet

The Music of Debussy.

The painting of the stary nights.

The trench wars of the world.

The dying of Monet,

The death of Claude Debussy

The death of Grandpa Lafayette

when dad was only one.

And life was only 19 hundred.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A century

A hundred years ago,

My grandmother was born.

She witnessed war after war,

Waiting for better years to come.

 

A hundred years ago,

She was brave enough.

Nurture a big family,

And passed away in peace.

(Hour 4-@Mejia)

 

 

 

Tin Type

“I saw her yesterday, again, in an antiques shop,

billowed

cotton floral dress,

dusty rusty gray and faded silver-oxide blacks,

a 20th century still-life in motion, tin type, I think,

I want to bring her here,

now, impossibly,

but,

would my America scare her?”

 

My last duty here,

ten days ago, I buried my grandfather with

his cherished tin-type, its wedged in

folded musing 

to himself.

I must not hold on longer, we need

high ground, and better food.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hour 5 (Insensitivity)

As I wrote my poem
A customer walked in
I responded politely to his request
He walked out
It sent a sense of insensitivty
That made me feel uncomfortable
Wow wonder if it was a >>>

Copyright(c)2022 Roxann Lawrence

The Piano

I once played The Wild Horseman on
the used piano my mother
bought for my lessons.

But didn’t like my teacher so
I quit before I could play as well
as she did.

It was an upright piano. Used. We
signed it inside the cover, back of where
you place your music.
That piano moved three times. From
the upstairs flat n Calvert, to the house
on Oregon and
back upstairs to the flat on Fairfield.

They left it there when my grandparents
died and they moved 300 miles
away.

Decades later my grown son and
a friend went
exploring  the house on Oregon, missing half
the roof, doors boarded up or
boards torn
off.

They found
an abandoned piano in
the wreckage. It wasn’t ours though.
Someone else
had moved on and left it
behind.

Nineteen Twenty-two (Hour 4)

The crow of a lone cock
signals the break of dawn
unleashing multiple crows

men who had hardly slept all night
roll up their mats, gird their loins,
unsheathe their machetes

and hit the bush path
to the village square
the town-crier

had sounded urgent:
at the first crow
of the lone cock

it must be the war
with the neighbouring clan
over border land

nothing can be more urgent
but alas, the cunning white DC
has come to pacify this land

Prompt 3

The light is always there
We just can’t always see it
The sky is always blue
somewhere
There was no urgency
to be
to go
no place for wheels to turn
no noise
no declarative
ending
just time
to shake loose
to let go without the gaze of others
to lie awake in colors
that command my attention
inviting solitude and silence

#4 irons in the fire

One hundred years from now
will we cry out at the ignorance of now?
plastic languishing in our bodies, our rivers, our sea.
the lingering melodies of mystics and creatives
who begged us to see.
some immigrated to new celestial stars,
trying to capture what we already had.

Will we be celebrating a new birth,
acceptance of all sentient beings
as equals, each playing their part
contributing to the whole?
mycelium’s web binding us together,
science and nature cleansing contamination
when hearts and minds can embrace the whole.