We’re going on a walk,
a ‘Words on Water’ walk,
with WLF and writers,
around the waterways
of Worcester.
A trip – not literally –
no accidents, please,
no bodies falling in the wash,
being swept downstream,
to pass through the estuary,
in Bristol, into the briny,
cold currents rushing you further
to the Atlantic Ocean
and across to visit friends
in America.
Day 26 Napowrimo ~ an etheree, very romantic [heh-heh], about the garage … with thanks to Kira for the form.
A
garage
is so much
more than a store
a used bottle bank
waiting until there are
sufficient to take along
to the recycling plant at the
rubbish tip and we know that we have
done our duty to the environment
new garage / workshop setup (Photo credit: riebschlager)
The Etheree is a simple progressive syllabic verse. It is attributed to American poet Etheree Taylor Armstrong.
The Etheree is:
o a decastich. (10 line poem)
o syllabic, 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10 syllables per line
o unrhymed
o focused on 1 idea or subject
It’s Napowrimo, it’s Day 25, and a triolet for the birds on the seed feeder was born.
Finches cling to full seed feeder,
grounded thrush pecks yellow mealworms,
pigeons play, ‘follow my leader,’
finches cling to full seed feeder,
as earth, the garden weeder, turns,
throwing worms to redbreast cheepers,
feels warmth in soil and from it learns.
Finches cling to full seed feeder,
grounded thrush pecks yellow mealworms.
Birds Fight at the Seed Feeder (Photo credit: dagnyg)
A triolet is an eight-line poem. All the lines are in iambic tetramenter (for a total of eight syllables per line), and the first, fourth, and seventh lines are identical, as are the second and final lines. This means that the poem begins and ends with the same couplet. Beyond this, there is a tight rhyme scheme (helped along by the repetition of lines) — ABaAabAB.
Grace (aka Heaven) ofImaginary Garden With Real Toadsasks for ‘lunes.’ I’ve chosen the Kelly Lune, an American haiku form based on syllables (one line of five, one line of three, last line of five; in a single stanza or multiples of same). This will also be today’s contribution to Napowrimo.
Lune: Dig It
She digs and digs and
loves the soil
rich with warm compost
Napowrimo, Day 17, and the prompt is to write poems of greeting. While over at Imaginary Garden with Real Toads, they’ve asked for a hello / goodbye poem too
Greetings!
I’m from Ibble-Wibble
you might have heard of us
the Ibble-Wibblers have a song
and it is sung like this:
Ibble, wibble, wobble, way,
A silly poem I write today,
Ooty, scooty, mooty, moo,
If I can do it, you can too!
For today’s Napowrimo, because it’s the 8th, we’re trying to write in ottava rima — an Italian form that, in English, usually takes the form of an eight-line stanza of iambic pentameter, with a rhyme scheme of a-b-a-b-a-b-c-c.
heh-heh … here’s my last ditch attempt:
Murderous Pigs
Gimlet-eyed pigs, gory and glorious,
known to be keen on anything to eat,
they move toward their prey, victorious,
for pigs will eat fine fair friends [and their feet].
A fat man climbs the hill, laborious,
the pigs they squeal dulcet death melodies,
puffing man falls, the pigs become wilder,
murderously biting the bones they fight for.
We are prompted to write a cinquain on this, the fifth day of NaPoWriMo. A cinquain is a poem that employs stanzas with five lines. Each line has a certain number of accented or stressed syllables, and a certain number of overall syllables per line.
The wonderfully named American, Adelaide Crapsey created the “American” cinquain, a form in which the number of stresses per line is 1-2-3-4-1, and the number of syllables is 2-4-6-8-2. So the first line would have two syllables, one stressed and one unstressed. The second line would have four syllables, two of which are stressed, and so on.
Here is my cinquain for Day Five:
Raku Fox
Raku Fox
Raku
ceramic hares,
and fox, who hides behind
the TV in the corner, peeks
and grins.
Twiggy in 1967, at the height of her modelling career, showing the look that made her famous.
Phew! The last one. As aprille says ‘Congrats to us all: we DID it. Who’d have thought’.
Today’s prompt asks us to write a poem incorporating at least three “I remember” statements. As napowrimo says ‘This invocation of memory seems a fitting way to end our month together’.
I have loved making notes from my memories, thinking about my growing up days and what times were like then.
This poem could go on for pages and pages and then some, and, since I first wrote this, I’ve added a much loved album track to the post. True to form or my style, I’ve tried not to go overboard in length but know I must write some more, there will definitely be a return to this topic. I have enjoyed it so much and have plenty more notes for the next in the series.
Remember When …
You’re not supposed to remember the sixties,
If you do then you did it all wrong!
But for the sake of a verse, I did some research,
And here’s the resulting poem.
I remember a time when technology
Was a term unknown to a lot,
When computers were sci-fi items,
And we were shocked by Room at the Top.
I remember sharing our telephone
With the woman who lived next door,
A ‘party line’, they called it,
You don’t hear of them any more.
There were McCall and Butterick patterns,
Oh yes, we sewed a fine seam,
21st birthdays were ‘coming of age’,
Girls had perms, aged sixteen.
I remember bouffant hairstyles,
The ones that gave way to Sassoon,
And I can remember vividly, the very
First steps on the moon.
I recall feminist writing
From Woolf to de Beauvoir to Greer,
Men puzzling what was happening …
Women had children to rear.
Buy British and I’m Backing Britain,
Bailey, The Shrimp, Terence Stamp,
Carnaby Street, boutiques were new,
And Cassius Clay was the champ.
The swinging sixties, the new generation,
Mary Quant and Habitat,
Laura Ashley, Twiggy, Liberty prints,
We wore tights and baker-boy hats.
Napowrimo said: in honour of Earth Day, on Day 22, write a poem about a plant. ‘Flowers, of course, have been the subject of poems since time immemorial, and continue to be a source of much inspiration’.
I am up-to-date! Yay
Six foot four – Sunflower
What could be
More
Outrageous
Than
A six foot four
Sunflower?
Native
Of the Americas.
Perhaps …
10 tonnes of Ai Weiwei’s
Famous porcelain sunflower seeds!
10 tonnes,
A 10th of those
Covering
Tate Modern’s
Turbine Hall.
The perfect sunshine
Yellow, fiery and proud,
Stunning spirals
Typically loud,
Typically
Times thirty-four inside,
Fifty-five outside,
Spirals.
Helianthus annuus
For birds,
For bread, medicine,
Dyes, body paints,
Sunflower oil,
Livestock feed, latex,
Yes, latex
Six foot four!
Nearly there … just this one and Day 22 to complete and I’m up-to-date! Day 29 and I cannot find a prompt from napowrimo – oh no! I’ll have to come up with something myself *racks brain* … OK, I have it … hope you think so too.
Blood Diamonds
November 2000 and police intercept a gang
Who plan to smash into the Millennium Dome,
To steal diamonds worth a mere
£200 million.
They intend to escape in a speedboat
On the Thames, like a James Bond film!
Conflict diamonds, synthetic diamonds,
Blood diamonds.
The monopoly is threatened.
Hidden hoarders of diamonds are scared.
Vast, is the hoard of secret diamonds,
Worth billions, yes billions.
A fall in the value of diamonds?
A catastrophe!
Ah, but we love diamonds, because they are
Expensive.
They are, (and we all know this),
Quite simply, a girl’s
Best
Friend.
Marilyn sang the famous song
About it
So …
It must be true …
And yet, the sadness of
Pain, politics and cruelty
Encrusts blood diamonds.
Napowrimo’s prompt for Day 28. ‘In 1958, Gaston Bachelard published The Poetics of Space. In some ways, it was a book about architecture. But Bachelard’s book wasn’t about angles and sight lines and how to make sure your roof stays on straight. It was about the experience of spaces, their psychological and perceptive implications’.
I am using poetic licence with this one, since nothing made me want to write about ‘the high vaulted ceilings of the cathedral, the low, cozy beamed roof of the cottage. Drawers, closets, the insides of seashells … A box that opens, a box that closes — the sense of space revealed and concealed …’ even though all are fascinating and, on another day, in another frame of mind, these things would get me going … but not today. So today, space for me is about the final frontier. I hope you like it.
At the 2012 Space Foundation Student Art Contest, Raquel Arens won 2nd place in the 6th-8th grade Painting category. The judges also awarded Raquel the Space Foundation Achievement Award.
The Final Frontier
Explore the planets, black holes and more,
Space is within and outside the door,
Investigate stars and space,
Keep on par, in pace
With the latest discoveries,
Beneaths and aboveries.
Space where e’er we go.
The biosphere the surface,
The biomass lurking below.
And our prompt for napowrimo Day 16 is based on the idea of a picture being worth a thousand words — napowrimo posted three pictures, all loosely based around the idea of the ocean, the sea snail was the one that I picked to inspire the following poem.
House of Beauty
A house of beauty
You carry fathoms deep
Tucked in amongst flotsam and jetsam
Aqualine iced blues merge to grazing greens
Whilst your sluggy mollusc body leaves a trail unseen
‘Do you remember “Opposite Day”?’ we were asked on Day 19, ‘… this was an irregularly declared day (usually Wednesdays … but not every Wednesday) in which statements were supposed to mean the opposite of what they usually do. … take a poem that already exists … and rewrite it so that each line is the opposite of the original’.
Hmmm, interesting, I must have led a sheltered life … I’ve never heard of ‘Opposite Day’. I’ve chosen Emily Dickinson’s short poem Hope and almost feel I should apologise to her for making something so beautiful into something so desolate …
Despair
Despair is as nothing – bare
It lies on the heart –
Whispers of isolation, desolation and hopelessness –
On Day 20, napowrimo asked us to ‘try taking notes while you are traveling … write a poem that narrates the process of getting from Point A to Point B’.
Journey
On the way
To a wedding day
That is overcast,
Not raining,
Yet.
Purring along,
Listening to song,
Snug as a bug without rug in a car …
Drowsy,
As up with the tweets.
We anticipate
A day so great,
With friends who match,
Harmonise.
Equals.
‘Hay(na)ku’ say napowrimo, ‘is a verse form similar to the haiku, invented by Eileen Tabios. The hay(na)ku form is pretty easy. Each hay(na)ku contains three lines. The first line has one word, the second line has two words, and the third line has three words. You can chain hay(na)ku together into multi-verse poems’.
Day 23 saw napowrimo challenge us to write an ekphrastic poem — that is, they tell us, ‘a poem that responds to or is otherwise inspired by a work of art’. Probably the most famous ekphrastic poem in English is Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn, but, say napowrimo, ‘there is no lack of modern ekphrastic work’. Examples include, Auden’s Musee de Beaux Arts and Robert Lowell’s For the Union Dead. Napowrimo invited us to ‘… go forth and find a painting, sculpture, photograph, or even a piece of music, and use it to inform your poem for today’.
Forever fascinated by the pre-raphaelites, the painting shown below is said to be of Persephone – I asked in the original blog if anyone could remind me of the painter and the title of the picture – the lovely Ann Fox said ‘I think your painting is My Sweet Rose (or The Soul of the Rose) by John William Waterhouse’ – thank you Ann, I am both grateful and very happy to have received a response to my question
Here is my take on this wondrous woman who is both life and death, celebrates wisdom and tranquillity, was and is much written about and is the inspiration for many paintings.
Persephone
Radiant beauty,
Goddess of the dead,
Scent of the rose
Against your
Sweet head,
Duality of life and death,
Fertile maid
With horror queen’s light breath.
She meanders in meadows of
Beautiful fragrant flowers,
Roses, violets and hyacinths in bowers.
Seized, snatched,
Carried off,
Stolen by Hades
In a golden four-horsed chariot,
To Demeter’s despair.
Odysseus at the House of Death
Sees a wraith
To make one ache
For those who have been.
Persephone now the
Curse of dead souls,
Mortal men distrust her,
With six months here and six months there.
It is said:
“This is no deception sent by Queen Persephone,
This is the way of mortals when we die”
So wait!
A kindness yet,
To let
The souls return,
Springtime Goddess of Rebirth;
Mystery initiations,
Sudden depressions,
Give way
To the
Mysteries,
A better life
A different and better fate after death.
Repeat to the beginning,
Seeds of the
Fruits of the
Field.
All shall return.
Life goes on,
She is the
Painted winecup,
A
Universal personification
Of life and death.
One powerful Goddess.
The dualities of an
Integration, of wife
And daughter, innocence
And wisdom, death
And rebirth
And she stole the beautiful Adonis!
Oh yes! A psychopomp …
With pomegranate seeds
And blessings,
For wisdom,
Tranquillity. She is
A feminine glory.
Death is not
Evil
‘Tis a cycle for
Good.
Napowrimo’s Day 24 challenge was to create a lipogram/Beautiful Outlaw/Beautiful In-Law. They explained that ‘A lipogram is a poem that explicitly refrains from using certain letters. The most classic letter to swear off, at least for English speakers, is “e.” A Beautiful Outlaw is a variation on a lipogram, wherein you refrain from using any of the letters in a certain name. For example, if you chose the name Sarah, then you could not use s, a, r, or h. A Beautiful In-Law is another variant, wherein you only use the letters in a certain name (better pick a long name!)
Irresistible really, and lending itself to a guessing game! One must use a name for A Beautiful Outlaw, who can work out the name that the following Beautiful Outlaw denotes?
Beautifu* *ut*aw
The first is a character
When with ‘h’ gives an ‘f’ swish
And can be shhhhh, mute;
The next is as a maw
Taut in amazement,
Tight in enchantment;
Three and quatre
Standing straight trees;
Wh … wh …
What is the finis?
