Poetry Friday: Statues in the Park

The challenge this month (given by Laura Purdie Salas) was concise---but wide open to form, point of view, language, and theme. Simply put, we were asked to:

 Write a poem with the title, "Statues in the Park."

I immediately thought of these figures near our DC home:

Yes, that's Lincoln.  Lincoln in Lincoln Park.  We went there often to people-watch, and were amused by the picnicking hipsters, and the frolicking dogs, and the cake-eating toddlers and their parents.  Good times.  But those days were not what I chose to write about. For me, statues are never just statues...and nothing is ever as fixed or as settled as we hope it is.


Statues in the Park


He is Lincoln. Lincoln in Lincoln Park!
While the slave cowering at his knees is twisted
with gratitude, underfoot as a beaten dog

as his chains are cut by proclamation
and people say—as they should—
that to show no struggle from within

but only liberation from without
is a lie—but I don’t know how to make a statue tell
the truth—every history has moments

we tag, and point to, and judge—
before we release them to whirl
in Lincoln Park which today, is a rallying point

for the KKK; no hoods, but raised signs
and a line of police horses so high you can look
into their pulsating noses and feel the earth shake;

they make a dam for the permitted
to flow safely into the street, numb
to the world; I cannot remember

a single face, only the snorting
as they walked out of Lincoln’s Park
leaving it to children who dodged

being caught, one by one, until
arms outstretched, their mosquito-bitten
legs gleaming, they stood frozen—

no one free
until all are free.

---Sara Lewis Holmes (all rights reserved)


Each of my poetry sisters has written a poem to this title, too.  Go see:

Tricia
Laura
Kelly
Liz
Tanita

Poetry Friday is hosted today by MainelyWrite.

Poetry Friday: She Walks in Beauty...or does she?

Imitation:  not a crime, but a way of learning.

At least that's how the Poetry Sisters see it.  This month, we take a famous poem by Byron ("She Walks in Beauty like the Night") and write our own, inspired by its form, style, meter...whatever takes our fancy. Or doesn't take our fancy in this case...for upon reading this well-known example of Romanticism by a poet who believes in "the celestial nature of women," I said:

UGH.

I'm not a romantic. I don't gush in public.  And why use poetry to praise a women's inner peace when in daily life you destroy all calm with your constantly unhinged behavior? At least reading Byron's train wreck of a biography led me to find his family crest, which is quite fun. (See above.) The motto is Crede Byron...or Trust Byron.

Riiiiiight.  As far as I can throw him.

As for the Romantic ideal of celebrating the “celestial nature of women,” the best I can do is praise the sea and its ancient feminine power.  And pound the hell out of crashing waves of iambic tetrameter....



Crede Byron (Trust Byron)

Two chestnut horses rear beside
a red-barred shield; and yet, above
this spat of muscled manly pride,
a mermaid floats, her foaming curls

as regulated as the tide;
they surge to meet her lifted comb
and skirt her sea-shined, cross-hatched sides;
her curves complete as halves of shells

un-landed; lorded not by shore,
she’s brine and bright with naught of night;
from salt she rose; now oceans roar
in throated coves: She rules. She rules.

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




You can find my Poetry Sisters echoes of Byron here:

Liz
Tanita
Tricia
Kelly
Laura

Poetry Friday is hosted today by Carol at Beyond Literacy Link.

Poetry Friday: Growing a Golden Shovel

Photo: Wolfgang Forstmeier

(Posting this a week late due to travel--and general procrastination.)

June's poetry challenge was the "golden shovel," a form created by poet Terrance Hayes when he took Gwendolyn Brooks's mesmerizing poem "The Pool Players; Seven at the Golden Shovel," and used its lines as end words for an entirely new poem.  (See his intricate poem, here.)

Or to put it another way,  Hayes grew a new poem from one he loved, and made it something astonishingly fresh.

And that, my friends, is what the Poetry Sisters are doing this month, too---only we are growing our new poems from the rich soil of Gerard Manley Hopkins' gorgeous poem Pied Beauty:

Glory be to God for dappled things – 

   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; 

      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; 

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; 

   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough; 

      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. 

All things counter, original, spare, strange; 

   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) 

      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; 

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: 

                                Praise him.

Source: Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose (Penguin Classics, 1985)

So much to choose from!  Each line is ripe with juicy words! What to pick, what to pick....???  In the end, I decided to use two lines, from the heart of Hopkins' poem:

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; 

Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough; 

(I also took as my title his opening word.) 

Glory 

We hope to be fresh
or even hot, as firecoal;
we hope to chew on an old chestnut

cracking open guarded words, until all falls
newly to earth. But if finches
require nine primary remiges on their wings

and twelve retrices on their tails---a landscape
of feathers carefully plotted
since the Middle Miocene age and

dappled evermore---to fly, then we, too, must be pieced
into lifting lines, and thrust from the fold
to be made fertile or laid fallow,

bouncing in flight like true finches and
tearing the earth as we dive to plough.

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

My Poetry Sisters' earlier posts of Golden Shovels (truly stunning---I mean, just WOW) can be found here:

Tanita
Laura
Tricia
Kelly
Liz


Poetry Friday is hosted today by poet Mary Lee Hahn at A Year of Reading.