National Poetry Month Celebration 2019 - Post Poems Here!

[Tracy Mitchell]

What an amazingly challenging prospect -- you'd never regret it, I think.

[Vaughn Neeld]

Day 8

The riderless horses next door
       never neigh.

I say,

"Those poor beasts must be
         mighty depressed,

 and silence is how they express it."

[Tracy Mitchell]

Awesome rhythm, Von -- another gem.

[indar]

 and silence is how they express it

Beautiful

[ajduclos]

What an amazingly challenging prospect -- you'd never regret it, I think.

Tracy, if I were to try to do an album of songs from the April Poetry Month challenge, how would you suggest I approach it?  Perhaps I/we/others could chose those that seems to have some lyrical life?  Perhaps one from each author?  Perhaps one from each day of April?  Many approaches.  And what about the authors - ought they be contacted first to see if they would be willing to let this interloper put their words to music? 
Simply putting just my poems to song seems to miss the spirit of it all.

Thoughts?

Aimé   
 

[Tracy Mitchell]

What an amazingly challenging prospect -- you'd never regret it, I think.

Tracy, if I were to try to do an album of songs from the April Poetry Month challenge, how would you suggest I approach it?  Perhaps I/we/others could chose those that seems to have some lyrical life?  Perhaps one from each author?  Perhaps one from each day of April?  Many approaches.  And what about the authors - ought they be contacted first to see if they would be willing to let this interloper put their words to music? 
Simply putting just my poems to song seems to miss the spirit of it all.

Thoughts?

Aimé   
 

Aimé -- setting your verse to tune to create an album memorializing the NaPo experience would capture the spirit perfectly, in my view. You are the author with the lyric voice, you are the one with the ongoing series of poems which would make excellent candidates for song-ifying. I for one would pay plenty for such an album.

[Gyppo]

I'm going to beg everyone's indulgence and post the next one a day early.  Tomorrow is going to be a series of bus rides, a routine blood test to assure my post-op recovery is still on track, and a lot of clamping down on claustrophobia and my dislike of crowds before I get home again.  But who knows what inspiration I may find out there

=====

Napo 9 - 2019

Maureen

Small, dark and intensely shy.
Hiding from the world behind a long fringe,
addressing her feet in social interaction.
Eyes alert, like a hedgerow vole,
but avoiding direct contact.

In class she'd hunch over her books,
left arm hiding her work, quietly intent.
She hated English classes, but loved art.
One Christmas she opened up briefly,
showing a wallet of twenty four pens,
new-fangled multi-coloured ballpoints.

The art teachers loved her, murmured gentle encouragement,
the others, wanting words or numbers, quietly despaired.

In English lessons she'd scratch out enough words to get by,
purely functional English, 
then sink closer around her book
like a hawk protectively mantling its kill.
She'd draw exotic and finely detailed half pages, 
letting those magic colours talk.

A few, a very few, were occasionally shown
to her small and trusted group,
I was not in that group.

Meanwhile I, a wary fourteen year old,
my pen having long outrun my reluctant tongue, 
scribbled words with a glib facility.

One day a stand-in teacher doubted my skill,
mocking my assertions of originality.
"No fourteen year old can write like this." 
I hesitantly assured him I could,
named teachers who would back me up. 

But he continued to doubt me,
at increasing volume,
insisting it took years to write at that level.

Then quiet little Maureen stirred, 
 shot her right arm up like an exclamation mark,
 everything else still hunched over her book.

"Yes, Girl?"  Clearly upset at the mid-rant interruption

"If he says he wrote it he probably did.
He does with words what I do with colours, Sir.
He can't help it, Sir."

Gyppo

[Tracy Mitchell]

Another good and worthy posting, G. I hope and trust tomorrow goes well for you.

Cheers.

T

[Colm Roe]

#8

Suddenly

In a shawl, she breathes ions,
in and out, walks along the brick
aside a man with a mandolin-
the wall is gray–-the world is gray
as if made of unfired clay.

If we be hermeneutically accurate
we see, suddenly, monkeys in sailor suits–
where holes used to be. Frisbee-shaped
manna with lemon icing, thrown through
Mediterranean morning air–-slicing.

Raptor Jesus sprints past, feet slapping
on the drenched sand, flip-flops splashing
ahead of the Dudes of Deuteronomy lashing
on steaming flanks of chariot unicorns flashing–-
June has always been surf music month.


~

Tracy, I hope you realised you rhymed in S1   
And then again in S3    Was there a raven in the room when you wrote this S? 
It's quite bonkers...but I love it.


 

[Sharon Leigh]

Iridology


In dreams, she says. In song or
other art, inescapable.
It's everywhere, the moon.
It's in my gaze.

She pulls on a dainty rose gold
vape, the sweet cloud hangs
nearby like an indifferent spirit.
Moon, round and dumb, or
slivered thin as almonds.
What can it mean. She tells me

of her cycle, of the topaz mountains
in her eyes. The chestnut valleys,
where dip and fleck portend more
than I knew, each stretch and spike
around the surprised pupil
such pure, important, precious
precious things.