A Poem a Day (663): Too curious

 
NaPoWriMo April 2024 (www.napowrimo.net) is now over, so to carry on with these cool prompts that get your brain turning, I thought I'd look at the ones from the previous April and write using those. So here goes with Day 1. 

Prompt: take a look through Public Domain Review’s article on The Art of Book Covers. Some of the featured covers are beautiful. Some are distressing. Some are just plain weird (I’m looking at you, “Mr Sweet Potatoes”). With any luck, one or more of these will catch your fancy, and open your mind to some poetic insights.

Too curious
 
Too curious, he said, shouting us down,
too weird, too peculiar, too bold,
too stout, too tall, too small, too colourful.
 
In a word: just too…
 
Too obstinate, too opinionated, too arty,
too confident, too shy, too able, too young,
too old, too beautiful, too plain, too…
 
Too anything. And too here!
 
So we opened the door and left.

 
Vickie Johnstone, May 1, 2024

A Poem a Day (662): NaPoWriMo Day 30 - Kelpie

 
Day 30

Prompt: we challenge you to write a poem in which the speaker is identified with, or compared to, a character from myth or legend, as in Claire Scott’s poem, Scheherazade at the Doctor’s Office.

www.napowrimo.net

 
 
Kelpie
 
It follows the curves of the Scottish heartland,
cuts into it, a deep V of stone granules,
coasted by ribbons of grass, leaves and moss,
dotted with silk buttercups and bluebells.
 
The redheaded girl treks the dip and the hill,
where the narrow road bends at a rusted gate
stood sentinel between two fences frilled by ivy.
Three stallions stand idle, evenly spaced.
 
One black, one dappled brown, one grey.
The third throws back his mane, and stamps,
holds her expression for a momentary while,
glances away. The weather turns, rain spills.
 
The girl carries down in the other direction,
where the downs rise up again, and twist,
and lean, down into the rested pool of sea,
a gathering place for surfers, but empty now,
 
the tumult none too enticing. A chill wind
cuts. By the rocks a solitary man looks out,
a fringed blanket draped around his shoulders,
hair sodden, hung in tendrils flowing.
 
The girl tugs her hood further over her head,
hands dug deep into her pockets for warmth.
The air chills, sky cracks, and she makes to go,
but the movement shocks him to turn.
 
He looks straight into her eyes, earnest and raw,
something familiar about him, as though she
has met him before, in a shadow moment.
In that second, he smiles, and it lights his face.
 
The intention to go forgotten, she stays put,
almost sculpture. He steps forward, pauses
a bare few feet away, pushes back the wet locks
of his hair, and despite herself, she smiles.
 
There seems nothing else to do in that moment.
It’s just him and the water. On the horizon a dot,
a something moves, but above the nimbus are calming,
the sea smoothing. And the lightning stops.
 
The stranger removes the blanket, folds it in his arms.
He wears a simple grey shirt, faded-out trousers,
and a pair of clumpy shoes. His eyes are jet orbs,
a stark dark contrast to his salt & pepper hair.
 
She wonders if to go, but his expression holds her.
He glances at the sea, sunlight blinking to glisten.
It flickers over the waves like a dance, so hypnotic.
She senses rather than sees the man move sideways.
 
In a moment he is gazing down into her eyes,
runs his fingers through her mermaid hair.
For some reason, she does not feel the need to move.
He points out, where a lone boat mars the still.
 
She waits for him to speak, but he steps away,
moves in even tread towards the edge of water.
In that moment she sees that his shoes are not,
but black hooves, deepening imprints in the sand.
 
The girl watches him saunter towards the soft surf,
where he stops and turns just once, his body shifting
into the powerful shape of the grey stallion, his mane
falling full of stars, eyes glistening with life.
 
Her feet carry her over the sand, crimson hair billowing
in the sacred breeze whipping up from the salted mist,
stretching her hands for the leather bridle with which she
will ride him out into the depths of the windswept sea.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 30, 2024
 

A Poem a Day (661): Figure blue

Figure blue
 
Into the blue, we figure it late,
a skater in a dreamless eight,
full-circle swift in always time,
the leaf, so fine, in ever shine.
 
We reflect to fake our own escape,
return always, this blue-wash fate,
the time of us, our always being,
a wreck strewn on a splice of living.
 
In keeping, we wait here for morning,
dawn’s disguise of the dark we’ve seen,
rewash in blue, we try to begin again,
knowing things will always end the same.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 29, 2024

A Poem a Day (660): NaPoWriMo Day 29 - Albatross

 
Day 29 
 
Prompt: you may know that Taylor Swift has released a new double album titled The Tortured Poets Department. In recognition of this occasion, Merriam-Webster put together a list of ten words from Taylor Swift songs. We hope you don’t find this too torturous, but we’d like to challenge you to select one of these words and write a poem that uses the word as its title. www.napowrimo.net

 
Albatross
 
The largest wingspan
to fly the furthest distance,
to just linger on the updraft,
hung in disciplined suspense,
floating high on invisible threads
connecting islands to states
over the breath of the waiting sea,
open arms that never end,
palms tilted to the watchful gods,
as though he needs a stopping point,
as if he would ever want to fall.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 29, 2024

A Poem a day (659): NaPoWriMo Day 28 - 3 sijo

 
Day 28 
 
Prompt: write a sijo. This is a traditional Korean verse form. A sijo has three lines of 14-16 syllables. The first line introduces the poem’s theme, the second discusses it, and the third line, which is divided into two sentences or clauses, ends the poem – usually with some kind of twist or surprise. Often written as six lines. www.napowrimo.net

 
Breaking

Breaking the still to split the seas in two, a lone figure dips
and rises on a wave, is swallowed whole by the arching whirlpool,
chords smashing and breaking in an endless, seamless dance.

 
Directions

Shells dug into sand, upended, point directions writ in water,
long dreamt of and magicked here, awakening depths of sound,
thank crimson starfish in rhyme, make the day fade out sublime.

 
Set sail

We cast a sail adrift on the ocean blue, wander at its arrival,
a message caught in glass. Set on being a castaway, we strike out
as far as our limbs can carry our sins, trailed by a shoal of dolphins.

Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 28, 2024

A Poem a Day (658): NaPoWriMo Day 27 - To the bone

 
Day 27 
 
Prompt: write an American sonnet. What’s that? Well, it’s like a regular sonnet but fewer rules? Like a traditional Spencerian or Shakespearean sonnet, an American sonnet is shortish (generally 14 lines, but not necessarily!), discursive, and tends to end with a bang, but there’s no need to have a rhyme scheme or even a specific meter. Here are a few examples:
·        Wanda Coleman’s American Sonnet (10)
·        Terence Hayes’s American Sonnet for the New Year
·        Ted Berrigan’s Sonnet LXXXVIII

www.napowrimo.net

 
 
To the bone

We’re all on the low road,          the way of the wanderer,
    the seeker,         deliberately taking the longest route,
            the other,          the in between,             the indifferent.

It’s a rite of passage        without the right to flow,
                        seeking that old missing thing       that has no name
                                            or identity        because it hasn’t been given one.

        We are our own guide, the lone skin.      Dry Ark.

                        Mine is the sun that scurries down from hunger.
        We are the walking, the unsettled,           the unfound.

                ‘Are you going my way?’ is the question you want to ask,
        but the only encounter you have is four-pawed.

                    An Alsation with a ratty beard,        his own story to tell,
        for he has journeyed further         and harder in his seven years.

            It’s something to chew on.          Like a dog with a bone.

Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 27, 2024

A Poem a Day (657): NaPoWriMo Day 26 - Down

 
Day 26 
 
Prompt: write a poem that involves alliteration, consonance and assonance. www.napowrimo.net

 
 
Down
 
Tunnelling Tarquin under, in the unseen,
looking low for a clearing in the obscene,
the grey-grime tumult of a city scene
afloat with sold, slick petroleum slime.
 
Visages of visitors, suitcases snagging,
stick and slide in slush and mud and gin,
escaping the smother, the fog, drawn thin,
the slay of a thousand hungry tongues.
 
Someone drew a way out in a line of chalk,
but it only exists if you can walk the talk.
The voiceless view only a cover of dust,
an estrangement in an ever-torn maze.
 
On a wide wood plank, sailors signal times
to the softest seas, mountains, myriad lines
of cirrus cloud, swept out so far it pines.
You will not see its true intention,
 
and it blows, how it blows, and it’s white
upon white upon white, flying for light.
And if you stay under too long this blight,
you’ll wither in the raw of your bones.
 
Starlings swarm where the skies rake dry
from a drip-down dawn, a saved goodbye.
It’s where the old ghosts walk in solitude,
where the lost eventually deign to die.

Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 26, 2024

A Poem a Day (656): NaPoWriMo Day 25 - What is your idea of perfect happiness?

 
Day 25
 
Prompt: we’d like to challenge you to write a poem based on the Proust Questionnaire, a set of questions drawn from Victorian-era parlour games and adapted by modern interviewers. You could choose to answer the whole questionnaire, and then write a poem based on your answers, answer just a few, or just write a poem that’s based on the questions. We have a fairly standard, 35-question version of the questionnaire. www.napowrimo.net
 
 
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
 
Too many empty gaps in the question,
not enough breaths of daylight
in an expanse of deep happenstance.
A trip-up. It was a trick question after all.
 
It needed a whole list of answers. And more
questions. It wasn’t just one thing.
But then she’d forgotten.
She lost her smile along the way.
 
He said she used to be fun when they met.
He asked what she was wearing; said she looked
like shit. All her friends were wrong for her,
he said. And her light had gone.
 
There were so many things she’d lost,
at some point, somewhere along the way.
 
Lost, and not refound. But maybe, just
maybe, she never needed those things.
He was no longer there, a heavy weight,
watching. He was an absence. A quiet.
 
Now she could dance if she wanted to,
anywhere in the house, even the shower,
abandon her clothes like an unkempt,
multicoloured body by the front door,
sleep with the cat and not feel him seethe
because an animal was getting more attention.
 
It seemed like another life, a dreamed-up existence,
a postcard bereft of a forwarding address.
 
Turning her mother’s fountain pen in her hand,
she gazed at the bright, young woman on the wall.
Posed against a mountain peak, she smiled,
smiled with that open innocence of youth.
 
‘Dear daughter,’ she wrote. ‘I just thought of you,
as the answer to a question I was asked today.’
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 25, 2024

A Poem a Day (655): NaPoWriMo Day 24 - Moondance

 
Day 24 
 
Prompt: write a poem that begins with a line from another poem. www.napowrimo.net

The first line is from Walter de la Mare’s Silver.
 

Moondance
 
Slowly, silently, now the moon
cherishes this gift of silver starlight.
Reflects the eerie arcs of her face
in the dark dish of swan lake.
 
Weeping willows gather in a wave
of green, hushed, heads bowed,
reeds dripping at the water’s edge.
Still surface breaks, shoots an echo
far into the night to the next bay,
a message of wisdom from the fae.
 
A cloud sweeps lunar cheekbones,
and in that second the willows step back,
sweep the lengths of their leaves upward,
stretch the tips of their limbs to the sky.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 24, 2024

A Poem a Day (654): NaPoWriMo Day 23 - Gingerbread

 
Day 23 
 
Prompt: we’d like to challenge you to write a poem about, or involving, a superhero, taking your inspiration from these four poems in which Lucille Clifton addresses Clark Kent/ Superman.  www.napowrimo.net
 
I wrote the first draft of this today in a pub with a small glass of Merlot by the sea. It's dedicated to my own personal superhero.

 
Gingerbread
 
It’s the smell of gingerbread rising,
fruity, tart, malty. A scent I know well.
It beckons me to follow, unseen,
like a misty finger signalling,
summoning me to do its bidding.
Dough rising from a hard, biscuit base.
It’s the smell I’ll remember decades on
when I am old and she is gone.
 
I don’t know how to make gingerbread,
but I know how it makes me feel,
taking me back to much simpler times
when my hands barely reached the table,
my eyes fixed on the china mixing bowl,
imagining what it would taste like,
if only my tiptoed me could reach it.
If I was lucky, I’d get a lick of the spoon.
 
Now, I think of all the things out of reach,
the times I was just too far from home
to relate the new crisis – the failed romance,
the lost job, endless soul-searching, the always
feeling you’re not quite good enough,
but she was always waiting there,
forever at the end of the telephone.
 
Sometimes she’d say pull up your big knickers
and just get on with it, to let things go.
She was always willing to offer her shield,
always ready to drop everything and listen,
because that is what a superhero really is,
when you’re afraid and you’re far from home.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 23, 2024