Today’s National Poetry Writing Month prompt asks us to use a news headline as a jumping off point. I chose to go with the one about the chap giving up solid food (and subsisting on beer only) for Lent this year. Enjoy: ** The body aches for absolution, for forgiveness and release from the weight around my waist, this man born by past seasons of surfeiting. So I offer this, a libation of liquid to quell the sounds of my inner monologue.
Off prompt today… \\\* You have taken seven years to get here each one a memory lodged deep in the space between the hunger of anticipation and the malaise of hope deferred. Now as I hold you in my hands, and see you, frail yet strong, you are Mother returned. I call you Aoife, for you have brought beauty to our broken places
For Day 5 of National Poetry Writing Month, the prompt is to write something aligned with “Twenty Little Poetry Projects,” originally developed by Jim Simmerman. Here goes (very loosely interpreted): \\\* The sun parts the curtain of the night its light like a knife cutting through the crust of bleary eyes. In its wake comes the sound of birds waking - a mellifluous melody and tribute to the muscle memory of the cycle of life and time. ...
For national Poetry Month day 4. The prompt for the day asked to write a poem based on an image from a dream. I chose to go with dreams as a genre of mental experience.. Here goes. \\\* What if a dream is the whisper of God, his touch, light on the shoulder feather-like, a word in the ear of the worn and the weary: Come drink, fill yourself with this water? ...
For Day 3 of National Poetry Writing Month. Today’s prompt is to make a list of ten words, and use Rhymezone to build a bank of words for use in a poem.. Here goes. \\\* Without a care the sparrow flits between the trees oblivious of the need to fret for bread or bed but returns each day to its nest, its place of rest from the coming and the going - from first light to the gloaming - and the cycling of the seasons as they decay; birth and death, being and becoming. ...
Place, for NaPoWriMo2020 Day 2, the prompt being to write a poem about a place. My old house on the corner of 3rd and 39th with its stubborn grass and red earth came to mind. I miss it! \\\* I carry your memories in my heart, the bright tint of your red earth whipped to fine dust by the Harmattan wind, the whistle of your tall pines, the smell of your freshly cut grass in the aftermath of mowing. I remember the sound of cocks crowing the call of the muezzin, piercing the morning air like a knife and cherish the memories of small things, of peace, of beauty and of simple days.
And so in the midst of all that’s broken in the world, its Day One of National Poetry Writing Month for 2020. Today’s prompt is to write a self-portrait poem in which you make a specific action a metaphor for your life. My choice is life as peeling onions. \\\* When it all falls apart, like a ball of yarn slowly unravelling, the wind whispers in my ear: this is how life is, an onion, complex in its layers each hiding and being hidden, drawing tears as its juices released in a flash rise. In the stinging we remember the promise of savoury things where in the present bland things lie.
For Lent Week 5, Monday. A response to the CoE’s #LiveLent reflection for the day. Photo by A Perry on Unsplash \\\* Without a care the birds flit blithely between the trees, their bare branches lit briefly as though by the light of exploding stars, bright colours and persistent chirps in their own ways declaring this is good.
For the start of Week 5 of the CoE’s #LiveLent Devotional for Lent 2020. Photo by Dane Deaner on Unsplash \\\* In the swoosh of the wings of the bald eagle diving to snatch fish from the sea - its sustenance elegantly eked by dint of labour day by day - and the quiet resplendence of the colourful coral, goodness resides; each in its way declaring, this is good, this birthing on the fifth.
This week’s assignment offered a choice of character depictions. I opted to go with reviewing Virginia Woolf’s 1925 essay, The Duchess of Newcastle , from The Common Reader First Series . Its subject is Margaret Cavendish the Duchess of Newcastle. I very much enjoyed getting to learn about her. Image Source: Wikimedia Commons \\\* It is difficult to come away from Virginia Woolf’s essay on the life of Margaret Cavendish with anything but a sense of admiration for the person the Duchess of Newcastle was: a libertarian who lived life on her own terms, a prodigious thinker, prolific writer and designer, all-round force of nature and perhaps proto-feminist. What is even more remarkable about her life is the context within which it was lived, times which seen from the lofty, enlightened heights of our 21st-century sofas seem like the dark ages. Given the latitude to explore and later express a non traditional interpretation of the roles of daughter and wife by both her mother and husband, we get the sense that virtually every thought she had was encouraged and articulated in some shape or form with no attempt to self-censure. It helped perhaps that there were no children to encumber her free spirit. Given Virginia Woolf’s own life and character – and reputation for being a free spirit of sorts too - the largely positive portrayal here does beg the question of objectivity given the tendency in all of us to eulogise those who inspire us and worship them as heroes. ...