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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

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Fog and Crows: Two Poems for You


Christmas Day Sedge and Fog

Regular readers of this blog have seen this scene a dozen times. Usually, the picture includes a sunset or a cloud formation, but because of the thick fog, the second line of trees cannot be seen, the mountain in the background cannot be seen, and, behind the broom sedge, everything is a blur. That is what Christmas Day amounted to--a blur of fog, lights, and silence. Oh, well!


Walking in the fog with Luna that morning, I got the idea that I would write a poem describing the fog in several different ways. Not unironically, I had a pretty clear picture of what I wanted to do as I walked, but by the time I drove home, my clear idea had turned into fuzz. The poem will need some major revisions, but all of the poems that you get to read here on the blog are first drafts and rough drafts. Maybe, you could offer some advice about how to improve it. ENJOY!


Foggy Dreams

 

The forest wears a sheen of white,

A soft ethereal pearl,

Lit by scattered strings of light

That cause the mist to swirl. 

 

Two eyes of heaven pierce the fog

One’s false and one is true.

Their arrows slicing through the bog

Make prisms in the hue.   

 

Last night, a storm from jagged clouds

Poured rain in gusty lashes.

Today, the sun, arrayed in shrouds,

Echoes the storm’s cold flashes,

 

And with a fire that is not bright

Because the fog resists,

It rolls along, a wheel of light,

Through heaven’s moving mists.

 

And all the world is black or white

Except where lancing beams

Cut through the haze into our sight

And wake us from our dreams.


Yea, it needs some work!


Well, with all the walking I've been doing lately, I have had numerous encounters (and non-encounters) with the three crow brothers. It is sooooo easy to write these "three crow brother" lyrics. I see what the crow brothers are doing and form it into a jingle, I associate their actions with something in the human world, and then I make some kind of (often silly) philosophical connection. It gives me something to do when I am walking by myself with Luna--besides playing Pokemon Go. I already have three more "three crow brothers" poems ready to go, but I'm saving them for later.


TWO MORE WEEKS OF POEM-A-WEEK! Then, I have to start revising all of them. I haven't decided whether I can share the revised poems until they are put into a book. We will have to see.


Anyway...here are the three crow brothers--or not! ENJOY!


Where Are Them Crow Brothers?

 

Where are them three crow brothers?

I ain’t seen them around

Though I walk the same ol’ trails

And tread the same ol’ ground.

 

They’re absent from the fairground fence

And from the dead oak tree.

They’re missing in the cedar grove

As far as I can see.

 

They’re not among the honking geese

Splish, splashing in the pond.

They’re not perched on the pile of poles

Of which they are so fond.

 

They’re not up by the gun range

Or cawing in the sedge

I looked for them at buzzard’s roost,

But not to near the edge.

 

I’ve looked and looked for four damned days.

I can’t believe they’re gone

Nor ever stayed here in this place.

What the hell is goin’ on?


See you next week!

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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