National Poetry Month Celebration 2019 - Post Poems Here!

[Gyppo]

(Today I'm coming late to the party. Thank you Tracy for inviting me into this stream. The poems are great, and the comaraderie is wonderful.)

#5 of my little snippets.

My trash can
      is down the street
luring me
       to finally meet
my new neighbor.

=====

 So true.  My first meeting with some of my new neighbours when I moved into my bungalow was on 'bin day'.  There's a neutrality about bin moving which lets you talk to complete strangers.

Gyppo

[Tinker1111]

I love the trash can poem above, I have to bring mine up from the road when I get home from the office. I however never see neighbors, we are pretty spaced. But it brings up a question, how does one indent on this site?

I’m involved in 3 different challenges which is getting crazy writing 3 a day. So I’m trying to combine some of them. This one has a prompt frame one challenge and a Verse Form from another.


Flight of the Mind

In sleep
we leave this world
and travel with our mind.
Creating images
of light and night
in dreams.
The flight
encounters fears
and tears and joys in kind,
engaging fantasy
and truth, all one
in dreams.
~~ Judi Van Gorder

Prompt: dreams

Verse Form: Cyclus

[Tracy Mitchell]

Hi Judi,

I do not know how to indent within the dialogue boxes as now set up. Some word processors from which you cut and paste will import the 'indents' with them, but not many.

A substitute is [space][space][space][space][space]. That all I can suggest for now, but I will look into it.

And Judi -- three sights? Wow. I have done two sites several time and am doing that again this year, although I know I will peter out. In the past i ended up resorting to cross posting so I never got to 60 poems. But I did get into the high 40's.

I love your traipse through forms [of which I have never heard].

Cheers.

T

[Gyppo]

NAPO 6 - 2019

Half a cat

My 'God-Cousin' painted trees and cats,
with oils, on hardboard off-cuts
scrounged from DIY stores.

I bought one of her 'riven oaks'
full of a haunting loneliness 
against an undistinguished background.

A placid introspective girl,
the lone progeny of a mismatched couple.
Her brush was her voice.

They had a magnificent tom cat,
a miniature tiger, the essence of
sinew, muscle, and stealth.

She sketched him out one day,
away in her private world
of pencil and instinct.

She added a vague background,
and over a few days he emerged,
head first, bursting with vigour.

Then she discovered boys,
and he hung on the wall, 
forever half finished.

Gyppo

[lisaeagle65]

For My Friend


First of April
I walk toward the river
On a path I hadn't noticed before.
Gentle breaths from
 snow tipped mountains
Cool the smells and sounds
Of another beginning.
Another ending.

My steps crunch and snap 
Old leaves and brittle branches
While a half-hidden sun
Scatters light around 
Like a seasoned artist.

A last years leaf
Lets go,
Sways cradle-like
Through color and silence.
I pick it up
Careful not to shatter.
It reminds me of you.
Luminous in a sleepy sun's descent.
Intricate veins
Map wisdom and tenderness,
Courage 
and  soft acceptance
Of rigid seasons.

As tree shadows slice the ground
I walk home
With you in my hand.

[Tracy Mitchell]

Love this narrative, Lisa.

And welcome aboard!

T

[Tracy Mitchell]

Gyppo - there is much poetry and humanity in this last poem of yours -- you are hitting your stride.

Cheers.

T

[Colm Roe]

30 ways to die.
#6

She had just moved in
to a beautiful new house
with a mountain view.

On one of those nights 
when God inhales deep,
removes the insulation,
reveals the sky complete
and drops mercury

in a thin nightdress
she crossed the road 
to a golf course,
lying down 
she gave in to her chill. 

Her final movements traced
large prints in the snow
a sludge of dark and ugly

and all around a tiara,
a dance 
of delicately curious fox trots.

[Gyppo]

An elegant dance with Death.  Perhaps more a willingness to surrender gracefully than to actively take life with all the mess which ensues.

Then a sudden resurgence of the most basic urge to live, too late to save her.

...Her final movements traced
large prints in the snow
a sludge of dark and ugly...

And I picture a literal tiara of foxes' footprints as they cautiously investigate this curious yet unthreatening new presence in their domain.

I particularly like the second stanza.  Nights like this can easily make you want to be at one with nature, with the stars above, the soil below, even when you have no conscious desire to die.

 Maybe she was just what my Gran, with her ancient wisdom, would have simply called 'moonstruck', in thrall to something too strong to resist.  Just as some would-be watery suicides, rescued in the nick of time, have spoken of the lure of the cool depths, the deep peace which beckons them.  Perhaps a 'race memory' from pre-evolution, before our species left the ocean.

Gyppo

[binx]

4/6 poem

Late Again, Dammit

Only the curious
or the damaged

wait for the short
pleasures of love


by Georg

Poems here are good. Where has all this been? I thought there were only four members here