So I'm not going to join in the April madness in the traditional way, because I'm already working on the Chosen Grandma story and am revising am supposed to be revising The Book Man. 30 poems are out of the question unless I totally pull them out of my butt, which No, especially since I haven't really written poetry in a while.
So my goal is one halfway decent poem a week for April. That's a minimum of four. Not many, I know, but a lot when you're out of practice and enough to flex your creativity muscles.
I swear to God I'm working on this, even though we're into our second week of April and I haven't posted *any* poetry yet. In my defense, I was waiting for my new commonplace book to come in so I could do all my brainstorming and writing in there. It's so purty!
Ugh, this is really hard. Every single spring I want to write a big, joyful poem about spring, but every year I feel like I fail miserably, even if I do produce one. It's hard to write metaphors about spring when spring is always the metaphor.
She likes cemeteries and old trees the stately silence:
sycamores with mottled skin standing sentry over the crumbled decay of centuries. Stones, names half scrubbed away by the wind and rain and the rush of ages.
She likes the silence the grass the roughness of bark and moss-eaten stones
the toys left on the graves of children born & dead so long ago no one can possibly remember their names or the disease that took them one bleak Christmas.
Toys left because we know the reason for the headstones, the initials inscribed in tree trunks, the way we leave a mark on everything we touch
to say, I was here.
She likes the stones she can barely read doesn't like them, precisely feels kinship with them the way she feels the spirits standing watch flickering like a projector image of times gone by
not like the movies no EVP no vases knocked off shelves no fear
Just a presence like the gentle hill in every graveyard and the ancient sycamore at the top
standing guard and reminding you: One day, you, too, will be here.
In high school I wrote about every heartbreak love was sky-blue, I said (no wonder I love that color) a thousand little pieces, I said (unafraid of angst or sounding too dramatic)
Then I grew up
I've found that at this age heartbreak is used against me.
You're throwing it all away, he said thinking I'd regret his loss (but how can I regret someone who used to poke holes in the condoms except to regret ever saying yes?) and then the knife point She's your oldest friend.
As if I was the one who deleted the one who stopped calling the one who let go quietly, the way a fishing line sinks into the ocean.
You don't even care, he said (as if I would tell him) hoping to see a crack in the marble something to use against me
but I never let him see
I remember in art class talking about Fiddler on the Roof how I liked it but couldn't bear the way Tevya's third daughter was cast aside.
I would do it, she said (it was then I think I knew) Faith is more important than family.
I was going to add more to that one and then once I had it down I just couldn't bring myself to do it. Even though it would've been a very different poem, had I done so.
Wow, "Cemeteries & Old Trees" really hit me. It's solemn without being over-the-top or not sounding genuine. This stanza is just really heartbreaking "Toys left because we know the reason for the headstones, the initials inscribed in tree trunks, the way we leave a mark on everything we touch" and then I love the way the narrative is just layered on top of walking through this cemetery. The poem feels like it's zooming in closer and closer to the narrator. Nice work!
you should know i am a time traveler & there is no season as achingly temporary as now
@niteowl THANK YOU oh my God it was so hard this year. I legit almost gave up when I didn't even have one poem halfway through April, like I was thinking of deleting my thread and everything, but then @Hannah was like, "DO THE THING" and I was like, "...yeah, okay."
(That's not *exactly* how it happened, but whatever.)
Follow your passion, stay true to yourself, never follow someone else’s path unless you’re in the woods and you’re lost and you see a path then by all means you should follow that. — Ellen Degeneres
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