Poetry Friday: In gratitude for unfinished work

The task this Poetry Friday was to write a poem in conversation with one of our older poems (or to revise it) in keeping with our overall 2020 theme of hindsight/foresight. 

Well.  MUCH could be said about this year in hindsight. And I have a well of poems I've written (most with my poetry sisters) with which I could converse. But I wanted to go back to December of 2019, when our task was to write a poem of gratitude.  I wrote such a poem, then.  I was happy with it.  But I also found a fragment of a poem from that challenge that I'd never finished (the first stanza below.) 

Why not see where it led? Where does gratitude...even a fragment of gratitude... lead you? 

I am grateful for 

silence, marshmallow rich, 

that grows as I walk, alone;

I can feel the silence expand 

to the sky, to the half-moon,

to the constellations.

I am grateful for

evenings, tender-crisp,

on the edge of shared winter;

I can feel the night collapse

to the marrow of the earth,

to the well of oldest time. 

I am grateful for

hearts, layers-deep

beating apart and together;

I can feel the rhythm move

us to our fingertips, to the end 

of love’s reach.  

               ----Sara Lewis Holmes (all rights reserved) 

My poetry sisters' hindsight can be found here:

Liz
Laura
Tanita
Tricia 

Poetry Friday is hosted today by Carol's Corner.

Poetry Friday: The Naani

The naani is a poem of four lines and 20-25 syllables, whose subject is often (but not always) the first line. It was created (according to this post) by "one of India’s foremost poets, Dr. N Gopi."  

Like most of us, I had never written one. Or even read one. So I embraced beginner mind.  No expectations. No comparisons. Nothing but listening to what might arise in the quiet. 

Our theme was fall, or foresight, or both.

Autumn is blaze and decay;

A shuddering blow of the horn;

Split fruit; one tree stark,

One still singing. 

                         -----Sara Lewis Holmes (all rights reserved)

My poetry sisters naani are here:

Liz

Tanita

Laura

Tricia

Andi

Rebecca

Poetry Friday is hosted today by TeacherDance.

Poetry Friday: To an Image of a Hippo, or Ponderous, or Both

September's challenge pounced out of nowhere (where did the rest of the month GO?) so maybe that's why I laughed when I read our task: 

"write a poem using ponderous, or an image of a hippo, in whatever form we wish!"

Ok, I had to think quickly, about ponderous things! What to do? How to frame this? Where even to start? 

Well, that's always the question, no matter how much or how little time I have...right? So I leaned on my never-fail poetry approach: research. It's not something we discuss much when teaching poetic technique, as we focus on rhythm, imagery, word choice, and perhaps form, or even rhyme. But poetry must also be rooted before it can grow, and for me, that means digging into the connections my subject makes with the world. This time, that was two-fold:  the word origin of ponderous (and other pond words)...and hippos, of course. 

Research always saves the day. 

Research

If a poet in a pond

were to ponder,

what ponderous

thoughts to weigh?

That “to pond” is to pool water; 

nothing to do with poundage,

still, arising from pound—

a place to hold livestock— so a water

version of that, to hold ducks, say.

Or carp. Or a poet floating

on her back to see what’s up

there, wondering who, in dialect, turned

pound into pond. So she can now write

about ponding, a hazard of low water 

at the dip of a path, or even make jokes

about pond scum, also called frog-spittle,

and joy! brook-silk….and yet, to ponder

is another thing, entirely: to think, to consider,

to weigh carefully. This she must do. 

Not simply float. Perhaps if she contemplates

the hippo. Now her thoughts bolt from her wet

coils of hair. To be a river-horse! To cry 

questions that carry through both water 

and air. To word-gallop as it can,

startling all, the terror of the mangroves, 

mating underwater, birthing crocodile

killers, not a ponderous bone

in its body of work. What then? 

What might pool in her ears? What might 

she say to her pod, her herd, her dale, 

her bloat? What if this pond weren’t 

all the world she knows? 

             ----Sara Lewis Holmes (all rights reserved) 

See what my poetry sisters did with this ponderous challenge here:

Tanita

Liz

Kelly

Laura

Rebecca

Andi

Tricia

Poetry Friday is hosted today by Jone Rush MacCulloch.