My poem “Fleeting” is up at Verbatim Poetry. It’s a found poem made from a paragraph in the March 2014 issue of National Geographic. It caught my attention because it echoes several of the images and ideas found in my 2010 poem “A Necklace for the Goddess of the Empty Sea” originally published in Poets for Living Waters (Aug 2010) and recently read by NS at The Poetry Storehouse.
Maybe it was the medieval
music, the darkness, or your young
age, but when we stood in front
of the Magna Carta in the museum
in Houston, you clung to my neck.
I don’t like the Magna Carta,
the Magna Carta is scary,
you whispered. I suspect it scared
King John too. Like you, he
probably would have been much
happier in the paleontology exhibit
with T. Rexes and Pteranodons, their
fossil teeth and mighty wings frozen,
stilled and silent. Somehow less
frightening than the freedoms
that old treaty began, freedoms
I know you’ll someday demand.
Unwrap each mote of dust
suspended in the sunlight
borrowed from a Saturday
spent dissecting almonds,
snakes, and birds. Our books
tell us almost nothing
of this goddess sheltered
in the ripples of the day
but open your palm to the
light. Feel her brush your skin.
Now sing us all the jagged songs
you suddenly can sing.
—
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams depart
Life is a worn-out athlete
With a failing heart
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams vanish
Life is an iron prison
Bleak walls and anguish
—
NaPoWriMo #8: Rewrite a famous poem
I like to have my students analyze “Dreams” by Langston Hughes and then write their own stanzas following his pattern. When we’re finished, everyone reads them aloud following the original. If it’s done right, if sounds like one long poem. The kids usually have fun with it, and some come up with some really cool metaphors. Much better than my weak attempt above, which I’m sharing in response to NaPoWriMo’s prompt to rewrite a famous poem.
Jazz or maybe rock, some country, when they
Ask that odd question about my favorite
Music genres and artists. But my tastes are
Eclectic. There’s always a bit of an internal
Squabble. It seems so odd. How do you
Determine which conflicting tastes should
Box you in? It’s as strange and unsettling as
Relying on physical appearances and style to
Understand anything true or honest about
Someone you’ve only just (or never) met, so
Here’s something that really happened:
I have gray hair, but momentarily forgetting,
I told the nice lady working at the DMV
It was brown. She took a photo for my license.
—
Between prairie fires, buffalo
and wind few trees could live
here. The ones that did take root
and survive grew tall over the grass.
We stopped the fires, and the buffalo
are gone. Now fences provide
shelter for saplings to grow.
But when I drive up 183 toward
Abilene sometimes an oak catches
my eye, a tree, hundreds of years
old. Settlers would have known
this tree, Comanches too, I’m sure.
And ever since I read Lonesome
Dove, I can’t help but wonder
what horse rustlers may have been
hanged from its branches, their legs
twitching in the space above
the wildflowers blooming.
—
I could tell you of the dappled sunlight
shining through thorny green trees,
the acidic soil and maybe a bright tropical
bird that lands in the branches before
fluttering away from some fruit picker’s
tired hands. Then the highways, the gray
interstates and the trucks that rumble
through time zones into the past. Eastern
to Central, the hours passing, the clock
resetting. I could also back up and speak
of processing plants where hourly workers
perform the mundane alchemy of phase
change, the solid becomes liquid. Poetry
is so ambiguous, you can’t help but wonder
what conclusions you might draw from this
obscured message, so I’ll clarify
and write it out in plainer mundane words
on a yellow sticky note: Could you pick up
some grapefruit juice on the way home?
Oh, and some cat food too. Love you.
—
They say Voyager crossed the heliopause
last summer with thirty thousand years to go
to clear the sun’s gravity. Our plutonium
spark, a flicker of human warmth returning
to the stars like that first purple martin
returning again in the spring to the place
where he was hatched or the salmon
swimming up blue streams. We are called
home to where our atoms first began,
the water, the sky, the stars. The silent iron
in our blood aches for the supernovae
and so lying on our backs beneath
the wind-swaying oak trees, we hold
hands and watch the stars, imagining that
long journey whose end we’ll never know.
—
a deer herd
silent through the trees
the dogs freeze
///
he pushes away
the approaching toothbrush
late sunset fading
///
dad’s telescope
pointing towards Saturn
eyes open to wonder
There is the blank page
or screen, the twisty open
road, the still surface
of your favorite pond.
Consider the rocks
at your feet, which one
will you throw in? One
is good for skipping, another
will make a loud plash,
and one might just hold
enough mass to create
a singularity as it rockets
down to the dark bottom.
A new universe is born.
The characters you imagine
may live and love and die
and debate your existence
while they’re young
drinking with their friends
what passes for coffee
in their pond bottom
universe. They’ll never know
how you wanted a second
chance, why you never said
goodbye, or where you left
your car keys this morning.
—