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Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.-Edgar Allan Poe

Poetry is when emotion has found its thought and thought has found words--Robert Frost

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance--Carl Sandburg

I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry--John Cage

You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you--Joseph Joubert

Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toe nails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own. ~Dylan Thomas

joybragi84
Oct 3, 20222 min read

A Brand Spanking New Nature Song and a Good Excuse, I Hope


My, oh, my! It has been a week exactly since I have posted anything, and eleven days since I posted anything to read. Here is why. I have seven classes, three Comp I, two World Lit II, one Comp II, and one College Writing. All seven classes turned in writing assignments last week. Yeah, I know. That was really dumb on my part. However, I had rearranged my class assignments so that I could go see Shaman's Harvest at Pointfest in St. Louis the previous week, and it was worth it to pile grading upon myself just to hear the band live. If you have never listened to Shaman's Harvest, you don't know what you are missing. Oh, and don't simply listen to what is played on Octane on Sirius XM. They have all kinds of songs that are not simply hard rock. Try something like Tusk and Bone for starters.

So, you folks know by now that Kellie and I walk with our dog Luna nearly every evening, and you also know that the leaves have not changed this fall. However, that does not mean that Nature does not put on some spectacular shows for us to see like the sagebrush with little yellow flowers in the picture above. I took that one.

Anyhow, today's poem, sticking with the theme of short songs about Nature that will comprise my next book of poetry, is about other colors of Fall that I have observed since I started paying attention in the last few weeks. The verse form is lyrical. It is rhymed iambic tetrameter, and it should work very well set to music if somebody wanted to do that. Please take the time to let me know what you think about this Nature song and the others that I have written. I love to hear from my readers. As always, ENJOY!


My Own Colors of Fall


Plucked rudely by a brazen gust,

Dimmed petals flutter to the ground

And redden the uncolored dust

Like blood drops on sun-splattered brown.


From brittle stems, small purple seeds

Plunge ticking to the Earth and lie

Atop the sunburnt mulch of weeds

And plum it with their violet dye.


The sun seems chilled when hued in red,

Its muted beams auburn and cold.

The cool moon’s white; it must be dead.

Gray shadows are all it will hold.


Changed leaves are not the only hues

That paint the harlequin of Fall.

Beneath the sky’s bright marbled blues,

I shade my eyes and see them all.

Comments

I find that I cannot exist without Poetry--without eternal poetry--half the day will not do--the whole of it--I began with a little, but habit has made me a Leviathan.-John Keats

We do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value.-T. S. Eliot

A man may praise and praise, but no one recollects but that which pleases.-George Gordon, Lord Byron

The great beauty of poetry is that it makes everything in every place interesting.-John Keats

Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion and passionate flow of poetry to the subtleties of intellect and to the stars of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet broken and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious something, made up, half of image, and half of abstract meaning. The one sacrificed the heart to the head; the other both heart and head to point and drapery.-S. T. Coleridge

The purpose of rhythm, it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the moment of contemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the one moment of creation.-W. B. Yeats

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