Skip to content

Author: James Brush

James Brush is a teacher and writer who lives in Austin, TX. He tries to get outside as much as possible.

To Call the Goddess

April 30, 2014 • • Leave a comment

The old man lost faith in rain,
stopped praying, whispered soft,
I’ve had enough. I give.

How many poems can you give,
brother, to call the goddess of the rain?
A shadow in a sheep’s clothes, soft

wings flutter, a sound so soft
you stop the car, pull over and give
a listen to the whistle of a train.

To hear the rain fall soft again? I’ll give.

—

Quickly #30: Respond | PAD 2014 #30: Calling it a day

Miz Quickly’s prompt was to respond to a poem you like. I wanted to end the month with another tritina, a form I stumbled upon a few weeks ago, and so I decided to use three words (rain, soft, give) from Dave Bonta’s “Springy,” which is part of his 3verses series.

And that makes 31 poems for National Poetry Writing Month. I didn’t plan to do it. I just wrote one or two and then kept going. And then it was the 15th, and now here we are. Thank you to Robert Brewer’s Poetic Asides Daily, NaPoWriMo, Magpie Tales, Miz Quickly, and the soon to be defunct We Write Poems (why do so many prompt sites/poetry communities close up after NaPoWriMo? Is it just too much?) for the prompts and inspiration. And be sure to check out Red Wolf Poems, a sequel to We Write Poems that starts tomorrow.

Thank you also to all of you who have stopped by to read and comment on my poems. I can’t tell you how grateful I am.

Trigger

April 29, 2014 • • 3 Comments

Today is a battered guitar crafted
from the light of a new wolf moon
and renewable Canadian cedar.
The strings are made of the glow
of city lights, the rumble of thunder,
the bitterness of coffee, the itch
of poison ivy, the smell of gasoline,
and, well, the sixth string is broken
but it sounded like the dirt under
your porch, Billy, at your house on
birdless Audubon. But with only five
strings, it’s more a banjo, jangling
too fast to understand, summoning
cold front clouds and grokking rain
with some minor diminished seventh
chord of gloom, that J-sharp-flat note
JB spent too many late night hours
trying to discover between the notes
of the western scale and the pages of
his misprinted Bible. And so we will walk
all through the night, a thousand miles
and never leave Austin, the barbed
hours picking and strumming that old
acoustic guitar in the neon pawn shop
window, the one you swear maybe
once belonged to some old testament
angel or maybe even Willie Nelson.

—

NaPoWriMo #29: 20 Little Poetry Projects | PAD 2014 #29: Magical/Realism

This is based on a NaPoWriMo prompt to incorporate 20 random and strange things from a list into one poem. I think I got all of them in, but I cut one or two for readability. Anyway, here’s the recipe.

I tried this with my students today. It went over quite well with several of my kids coming up with some astonishingly good stuff, most of them having fun, and more than a few wanting to read to the class.

Oh, and Happy Birthday, Willie.

Rust in the Radio Sky

April 28, 2014 • • 5 Comments

Do you see rust in the radio sky?
The laughing truth of the galaxies’ weight
can be borne in the chambers of one heart,
or an insect like that blue dragonfly,
the buzzing one circling your empty plate.
Perhaps the time zones aren’t so far apart.

Do you feel the dust in the shifting wind?
How many crooked roads can you make straight,
organized like some magician’s flowchart?
Did you answer no and no and none, friend?

Here is where we start.

—

NaPoWriMo #26: Curtal Sonnet | We Write Poems: Wordle #16

This is an attempt at a curtal sonnet. Sometimes, the form and the rhyme drive and take you nowhere.

—

BIrds Nobody Loves coverReminder: My poetry collection Birds Nobody Loves is on sale through the end of April for National Poetry Month. The Kindle edition is $0.99 and the paperback is $5.18.

4.25.14 (Three Cinquains)

April 25, 2014 • • Leave a comment

firewheels
bees navigate
fields of wildflowers
I stop and watch
idle

—

firewheels
windblown, yellow
dancing, twisting, shimmering
lunchtime passes too fast
enough

—

stoptime
fields in red bloom
killdeer race through the grass
and bees hover silently, slow
firewheels

—

This is an attempt to write cinquains in the three formats found here, but using the same or similar topics and words (firewheels, stop, enough) that I also used in today’s NaPoWriMo / PAD tritina poem “It Is Enough.”

It Is Enough

April 25, 2014 • • 1 Comment

Firewheel (aka Indian Blanket)

It Is Enough

It is enough to walk among the firewheels
even if for a few minutes. It is enough
to breath the springtime air and let time stop.

It is enough to walk up the hill to the stop
sign. It is enough to feel the sun that firewheels
across the sky. Is it enough to say enough?

It is enough to savor cool water, enough
to lean against the wind imagining it will stop.
It is enough for bees to navigate the firewheels.

The firewheels are enough to make time stop.

—

PAD 2014 #25: Last Straw | NaPoWriMo #25: Anaphora

The Ramble

April 23, 2014 • • Leave a comment

It was a sunnycool autumn day when I wandered
the Ramble in October of 2010. I wound up in
the 80s, planned to hit the Guggenheim, which I’d
wanted to visit ever since I took that art history
class my senior year when I sat between Emily
and sad Maria. But everything in the museum was
dead, just a bunch of paintings and tourists and
a couple of potheads giggling at these famous
pieces by Kandinsky and Pollock and Picasso
and other celebrity artists. But I wanted a hot dog
and to get back to that perfect day where I could
shoot birds with my Nikon, and the leaves all
changing colors in a way they never do in Austin.
I said it was a cool day and I suppose it was, but
I’m not from New York, so what do I know? Maybe
it was hot. And so out onto 5th and back across the
park to the Upper West Side. I hoofed it to Columbus,
loving the city, loving the day, the weather, the birds,
loving you, travelworking in some cubefarm in Midtown
on this beautiful day. I skipped the Natural History
Museum since you’d want to do that and someday
I bet we will, and we’ll bring our son who was with you
that day too even if we didn’t know it. Didn’t know it
at the time, it wasn’t just the two of us anymore.

—

PAD 2014 #23: Location | NaPoWriMo #21: “New York School

My attempt at a “New York School” poem using many of the “ingredients” listed here. I decided to set it in in my last trip to NYC back in 2010, tagging along with my wife on one of her work trips.

Extreme Love

April 23, 2014 • • Leave a comment

Love may be found by soaking a piece of moss
in spring water. Love is short and plump

with four pairs of legs, each with four to eight claws
called discs. Love occurs from the Himalayas

to the deep sea, the polar regions to the equator.
Love can withstand temperatures just above

absolute zero to well above the boiling point
of water, pressures six times those found

on the bottom of the oceans, ionizing
radiation at doses hundreds of times the

lethal dose for humans, and the vacuum
of outer space. Love is water dwelling. As water

expands upon freezing, dehydration ensures love
won’t get ripped apart by the ice. Love can survive

in a desiccated state for 10 years. Over 1100 species
of love have been identified. Most species of love

are plant eaters, but some are predatory. Love is
ancient, dating from the Cambrian. Love may be

viewed under a low power microscope, making love
accessible to students and amateur scientists.

—

This is a response to Dave Bonta’s Facebook call to write a poem about the extremophile Tardigrade aka Water Bear. It’s in a similar vein to last week’s Desire/Tarantula Hawk replacement poem. This is kind of a fun exercise, and I wonder if I might keep doing this. Maybe come up with a field guide to the emotions or something like that. I used Wikipedia for my source material.

Lazarus Jewelbox

April 22, 2014 • • 4 Comments

Inside a shell, there was a sea
holding all the world’s blue waters.
But it was also half full of drought.

All she’d ever known was drought,
but ear to the shell, she heard the sea,
the circling cadence of the waters.

Caroline released the waters
and left a shell now full of drought
and threw it deep into the sea.

Sea waters stall the birth of drought.

—

PAD 2014: #22: Optimism/Pessimism | NaPoWriMo #19: Seashells

After yesterday’s attempt at a sestina, I decided to try the related tritina, which seems to offer a bit less rope with which to hang oneself.

The Basics of Pressing Flowers

April 21, 2014 • • 1 Comment

The burned land around the lake is dead
while up above the sky glows red.
Is this the song you longed to sing?
Because now it doesn’t mean a thing.
In this wasteland rid of wildflowers,
my watch ticks away the painful hours.

I walked these ruins for many hours,
imagining the ancient dead.
Around the tombs, funerary flowers
plastic yellow, orange and red.
You once asked if I knew anything.
I said perhaps we should just sing.

Remember all the kids out cruising?
Driving fast through midnight hours
stupid believing we knew everything
we just jammed to the Grateful Dead.
Now I search the books you read,
and find, pressed, your favorite flowers.

I asked an expert the meaning of flowers.
She smiled and asked what I was using.
She said, You tremble and your eyes are red.
Never mind, I said, it was this love of ours,
and these flowers have long gone dead
so now their meaning isn’t anything.

She said, Don’t you think love’s a thing
that we can write in old pressed flowers?
In these pages they’re not dead,
and if you listen, you’ll hear them sing
that lovely forgotten song of hours
spent watching as the sky turned red.

And so I stop and think of you, Mildred,
and I search for a trace of anything
that might speed up these lonely hours
and help me find the proper flowers
to answer you in pages pressing
as if you weren’t these ten years dead.

As I read a guide to pressing flowers,
it was an odd thing to hear young birds sing
through the afternoon hours of the buried dead.

—

PAD 2014 #21: Back to the Basics

My first attempt at a sestina. I wanted to play with words that rhyme so I started the first stanza with AABBCC, knowing that the rhyme scheme would change from stanza to stanza, sometimes falling apart all together. I like the way some of it sounds, and I might try it again sometime.