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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
Aug 42 min read

Poem-a-Week Challenge: One of Three


Oh, boy! I wrote three poems this week, but I am only going to share one with you because this is the last Sunday before the Sunday that I have to go back to work. I really do not have any great desire to return to work. It would be nice if I could make money from all the writing that I do--and reading.


But, the reality is that students are out there waiting to be educated, and I have the knowledge and tools to do it even if I lack the desire. So, even though I wrote this poem back on Monday or Tuesday, and I was not feeling the impending return to the college campus, it is somewhat fitting to my mood this morning. Don't let it get YOU down! You probably don't get summers off like I do. ENJOY!

The Shadow of a Cloud Passes Over Me

 

It stirred me though it lacked both light and mass.

I felt a hint of coolness as it passed

And climbed the lily’s stalk and dimmed its flowers.

I watched it as its darkness spread

And drew life’s essence from the dead

And breathed the spirits up like inverse showers.

 

The shade was like a squall caged in a prison,

A whirlwind guillotined as it had risen,

Or thunderstorm that never roiled to being,

Yet the shadow made me shiver

Knowing chaos spreads forever

And light and life and love are always fleeing.


I have finished my editing of the proof of Uncle Boog and the Dogfight. I want Kellie to take one last look at it. I found enough errors that I want to fix them. This time I only found a few repeated words such as in this phrase "...like bone like white..." and "...chairs chair..." I don't know how or why I do it or how I missed things like that in the first and second edit. However, there were enough of those types of mistakes that I am editing ONE MORE TIME. This IS the last one. I promise. Then, we've got to get to work on getting this thing our there and getting people to buy it. That is always the hard part.



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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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