23

For today's prompt, write an exhausted poem. The poem can be a first person account of your own exhaustion, or it can describe the exhaustion of someone (or something) else. Heck, I guess it even could be about exhaust, huh?

Overwhelm

What would happen, I wonder,
if one more, or ten, or a hundred more students
needed linear perspective explained today. Right now.

Maybe I could do it
but already a blackbird has flown out of my mouth.
No one saw
Even I only felt it

Maybe I could do it
Go over it again
- where to look and why
what to try to see and what it could mean
what vanishes where and why

Look here, I might say,
pointing to my tongue
as my brain flings open
and flocks take flight
pouring through my senseless mouth
emptying my head
of wings and instinct
pressure and feathers
and hundreds and hundred of instinctual eyes
More and more empty my head
Obliterating the clear sky
scrubbing out sense in a collective shudder
of inexplicable wings

Look there, I might say, when I could speak.
Do you see that last bird
flying alone? There
above the dull, beige suburbs that recede
as if into infinity.

The bird looks peaceful.
Getting smaller.
But it isn't really
It just looks like it.
And in both truths there is something

- the divinity of the real.

For now,
just draw.

Ask with your pencil.
Please don't speak.

24

For today's prompt, write an evening poem. My initial thought is that this poem would somehow involve the night, but upon further reflection, I guess it could be about evening things up or something.

Montecastello

When I was young and in Italy
a fellow painter girl told me
at the dance in the piazza that I was
crepuscular.

What a strange word, I thought.
But more, how did she know.

In the dawning hours I had dreamt
- maybe - of Etruscan tombs and the birds and grapes
of their afterlife
and water of mine
filling the chambers
or brushes or ice
or something but no doubt
the pigeon hum on the tiled roof
finally faded to sleep and its tapestry
- its collasal craftsman.

weaving sticks and concepts
fears and stairwells
brushes and ice

A shell of a person most of the day
- most days
Much of the night too
- most nights

But in the turning hours
the sea of my love
spills all around the world.

No one could be happier.

The first breeze of evening.
The old man and the accordian.
Two old neighbors on the piazza
Umbria.
Cicada in the grass
and me, tanned and alive,
moving past the cypress.

Impossible not to dance.

21

For today's prompt, take the phrase "According to (blank)," replace the blank with a word or phrase, make the new phrase the title of your poem, and then, write the poem. Example titles might be: "According to Bob," "According to these instructions," "According to the government," "According to the sun," etc.

According to the Moon

According to the Moon
one is alone in space
without vision
or weather
or touch to the surface

According to the Moon
there is nothing
not even to be
not even loneliness

One could be like this
forever
for trillions and trillions
of years

What is a year
to the Moon
that does not know
its tiny crescent side
that does not see its reflection
rise white into the high and glacial lake
that does not know it lights up prey
and hides behind clouds
and has opened up one soul after another
over and over for millenia until
the billions of eyes last close

gentlest of celestial keys
perfect companion
of goodbye

and so it is possible
to not know
- not at all-
how we are
the light we give
who looks for us
in the dark
and, finding us,
- out there, somewhere -
is, in that darkness,
for that time,
saved.

20

Today is a two for Tuesday prompt. Here are the two options:

1. Write a looking back poem. There are a few ways to tackle this one, I guess. The narrator could be reflecting on the past or literally looking back (like over his or her shoulder).
2. Write a poem that doesn't look back. This poem would be kind of the opposite, I suppose. Narrator who refuses to look back or who is literally looking forward (or I suppose another option even is that the narrator is blind or something).



Don't look back

Don't look back.
It doesn't matter
The past burns at your feet
burns up your legs

No.
It doesn't
It is cold as pavement.
As interesting as a stripmall
Why dig there?
There is no more treasure.
No more X.
No more spot
or one to go looking with.

No one cares.
Or ever will.

It doesn't matter.
Just hurry, before it's too late,
and find something else
to lose.

Poetry Challenge - Day 19

For today's prompt, write a poem about somebody and be sure to include the person's name in the title of your poem (no reason to hide the person's identity here). Write a poem about Abraham Lincoln, Emily Dickinson, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, your next door neighbor, your child, or the person standing behind you. I guess you could even technically write a poem about yourself (just make sure you include your name in the title).

Emily Dickenson

I didn't know what I was touching
when I ran my little hand across the cool cherry wood of your desk.
I was believing my mother
that you had been great
and I was trying to feel it.

I was understanding
- though I didn't put it to myself that way -
that a bird that sang in the wet red leaf beech tree
in a damp later Amherst day
outside your window was important

In the twelve part lilt - Meaning

Some white dress was out
on a little high bed
as if this person
could return who I would learn
was
in one room
more than without walls
but Precise in space
exactly located without apology
Nowhere

the essence of Essence

I didn't know that you
- in fact, only you -
are (could touch) (write out)
(find) (name) (dash) the twenty words that
are my living.

I don't need to go anywhere, either.

What is the difference
between the seed
and the arching, broadened
weather widened beech tree?

You are the seed.
I am a seed.

You are my sister
in the space - the dash - that makes listening
possible.