Prompt 448: Matins 10

I almost titled this post “Looking for Robert Lee Brewer”. Long story short, I found him three days later. He’s the reason I got into poetry. I can’t remember how long ago it was, but I found Robert, got into poeming and then the rest is history. This year’s 2021 PAD challenge will be my swan song I believe. If you like you may submit your fresh poem to my poetry journal here/ So here it goes. Robert’s prompt is to write an “introduction” poem.

I know not but we’re lumped together
fetching hyacinths–“they called me the hyacinth girl”–
as if what we do is anything
of importance. And so we half-gagged ourselves
so we could not speak, and muted
in society, we recoiled.

We secretly met, and held hands,
fastidious about who we let in,
and thus cut off, we do our conjuring
in language, grew in spirit. So
in retrospect, that’s what it was,
how we chose really to live.

Prompt 448: Matins 9

And all of a sudden mad March is over. March was listless. And yet full of lists of things to do. April on the other hand is all about poetry. Last night I looked out to the full moon. I wonder, what are you full of at the moment? Do you have a sense of fullness? Or do you feel a rich emptiness? Is it the same thing? I know I am full, chasing after this and that. Yet empty, but that’s a positive. After all that chase, you wish you are content and at peace. I’m not sure if I’m making sense. Anyway write about fullness.

Those silences, but life rolled on.
I grew histrionic and false.
You didn’t like it one bit.
And then it’s all water
under the bridge.

What use was belligerence?
What use indeed was being prickly,
and defensive? I want to be
weightless; I want peace.
And love? I want it rich
as chocolate.

Prompt 447: Matins 8

Sleep–do you have enough of it? We spend half our lives asleep. Or trying to sleep. I remember when I was in my 20s sleep would knock the daylights out of me and when my eyes opened it would be daybreak. Sleeping like clockwork is such a luxury. Because when I had kids, my sleep was severely broken. And I never really got back that uninterrupted sleep. Do you sleep jaggedly? But anyway when you sleep you dream and when you come out of a dream you awake. That’s how half our lives is. Sleep feels like astral wandering when you’re having an out-of-body experience and things (people, events, feelings) unfold in your mental state. And is death something like sleep, when your soul is elsewhere? So write about sleep/dreams.

What’s it like living Life After,
I ask of you, as in dreams
we would be doing things, as in life
if that were the goal. Then would
sunlight bedazzle the night?

You would be wandering in strange streets,
you said. Your face obscured.
And a blackbird would sing,
wouldn’t it? Take these sunken eyes
and learn to sleep…

Would you like to be the spokesperson
for the dead? Sing, the Phantom said.
Maybe that’s what I’m doing,
isn’t that a laugh! What cadences
I long to keep.

Prompt 446: Matins 8

Sometimes you feel life is good. Like waking up on the right side of the bed, figuratively speaking. Then all feels well again. You feel laid back, relaxed. You get busy and active. That’s the way it should be, and may you have many days like that. Part of the goodness for me, is to get back to reading my current book. The power of a book that engrosses you, ah! That’s like good medicine. People may ask, why bother reading fiction? Fiction tells you stories that you would like to hear, out of curiosity, and you do get something out of it, depending on what you’re reading. Write a poem about books/reading.

In the evening the egrets came,
flapping into stillness.
We laid back, in the sunset.
Me, absorbed into a book, could not tear
away from, as if my soul was
somehow involved.

Reading as a way to self-knowledge,
fiction being more real while
normality settled around like
dew, evaporating. To self-forget,
steeped in another consciousness
was to become a feather.

What pilgrimage is this?
The ultimate question.

Prompt 445: Matins 6

You reached a certain point in life when you start to look backward. Because forward seems a shorter passage then the backward part. And then you may want to try writing a memoir. But it’s never straightforward, because the writing changes you. The writing is about the change. You are not the you of yesteryear. Write a poem that is a memoir.

In my middle age I am winnowing
the past, can still remember
the sanguine girl I was,
a moth to the flame
in a verdant field.

I absorbed the losses now,
chased the wind of forgetfulness,
asked the writing to be exacting.
Not wishful thinking, you said
pedantically taking my hand.

What can I say but I did not know,
could not know. The crows
kept circling, pecking,
black and sleek. I looked toward
the seabirds, bobbing.

Prompt 444: Matins 5

As we transition to spring, as the sun begins to shine, something begins to stir and words want to fill our belly and warm us. Is that so for you? Oh the sun, the sun! Great shining orb in the sky! If you, like me, have been hibernating for too long, would you just come out for a while, to bask in the sun? Well, I’m expecting April to be a flowering season for poetry. So come out and play! Submit to our current Dream journal here.

I’d been mostly a leafless tree bare
of blossoms, but what would baring myself
mean, saying look at me, what shape would you
discern except the stripped, the Jonah
in God’s whale belly.

My womb is tear shaped. This spring
I will rake the earth one more
time, be all artifice, all evasive
you would say, so no one would
notice a wiry shape.

I will look into your shining eyes.

Prompt 443: Matins 4

Time flies. 2020 flew by, and is now gone. We were all grounded, and then now we’re poised to expect release. The release came but partially, and we’re in fact still grounded. Like our wings are wet and we cannot fly.  They weigh us down. How then did you find solace? I thought we’d given up on capitalism, in early Covid. But actually there was so much consumption, online at first then it’s online and bricks-and-mortar. Devil may care! Maybe it’s a different story for you. Whatever it is, let us hear it. 

Details here.

For a while now I’d feel muffled.
No sound ensued. How does it feel like
to live in a soundless world?
When words inflate and pop,
are of no use, and everyone had gone
back to science, tech and engineering–
I say go there, feel the fullness in
change in the real world.

One day you’ll come back,
searching. You’ll look different,
feel different, and I’d say
this isn’t vanity.
I’d slayed a few sacred cows myself
in the muffled light.

Prompt 442: Matins 3

How has the pandemic affected you and those around you? With hitherto unknown restrictions in our daily lives, with aviation and tourism having taken a bad beating, with rising unemployment and shuttered businesses, we’ve all entered the same storm. Same you say, but not the same effects obviously for every one, depending on the circumstances in which we find ourselves. I wonder, does poetry help as if by sharing we all understand better what this pandemic means for every one differently? How do we continue to find beauty and joy in our struggles, in spite of our struggles? Red Wolf’s The Coronavirus Poetry Issue hopes to stir up the conversation. Details here.

The world violently sundered
into pre and post Covid, and so I write on
and on, asking for a donation
from the stars.

My lips smeared by tea,
my mismatched pearls, luminous
and blue. We graze together
as you meant, ex racehorses.

O so many people on this planet,
every soul counts?
But yes, your secret grace–
that, I know.

Prompt 441: Matins 2

I was just reading Louise Glück’s October poem. And there’re these lines:

Between herself and the sun,
something has ended.
She wants, now, to be left alone;
I think we must give up
turning to her for affirmation.

I don’t know what language does, but it does something. It digs. It reflects. It creates. That’s why we turn to language: we must speak, or we die. The world was spoken into creation wasn’t it? So why don’t you pick up a pen and write about what language does.

Here’s mine for today:

It sounded like an incantation,
or church bells tolling, musical
tinkling sounds of the evening.

Don’t we want a slower pace now
that we’re bruised, nursing a bad knee–
ah, kneeling would be a bad idea.

I needed her words, deep echoes
my permeating ears solaced in,
burying toes in sand.

Prompt 440: Matins

I am terribly conflicted when it comes to writing poetry. You know, whether to write poems, whether to publish poems, whether poetry is useful (the answer: it depends), whether there is better employment of my time elsewhere. I’ve left poetry and I’ve come back to it again. So I’m returning. For one last leg, at least. I’ve still got a current thematic issue running, called The Reaper. Find it at Red Wolf Journal.
Submit if you like.

Sometimes a broken thread like here.
I stopped and went away, left this stranded.
Am I to bow to you, acknowledge you?
I covered my eyes and looked away.

Then I felt stranded, rudderless again.
The killer whales attacked viciously.
You rose like the sun, reclaiming me?
I was drowning, you saved me.

My story anyway, on repeat.