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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
Jul 222 min read

Poem-a-Week Times Two: You Didn't Think I Had Forgotten Did You?


I took this picture the other day on one of my rose blossoms. My red rose bush is going crazy. It has over a dozen blooms on it right now. My pink rose has not had a bloom all summer. I hope it isn't dying. It seems to be growing. Any advice on how to make a rose bloom?


Anyway, with all the traveloguing that I have been doing lately, I bet that you thought I had forgotten all about the Poem-a-Week challenge. Well, GOOD NEWS! I didn't. I will admit, hanging my head in shame, that I did not write a poem for over ten days from the Fourth of July through vacation time. However, I did write the next poem the day after we got home from vacation and after Kellie and I had gone on our morning walk. ENJOY!


Midsummer Funk

 

Midsummer funk has settled in.

No birds cry out but doves and crows.

A thorn gleams at the nettle’s end

To stalk and stab at shoeless toes.

 

At night, the fog lies on the creek

Then elevates its stagnant smell

And lets the sun disperse the reek

Across a landscape miming hell.

 

Shimmering waves don’t move tree leaves.

A dripping sweat won’t cool the skin.

Only one tree frog still believes

That he can call rain back again.

 

And so, he cries until the heat

Chokes out his hopeless chitter.

The sneezeweed grows along the street,

And, man! its scent is bitter.


Finally, along those lines, I threw together a poem about the sun a couple days back. I didn't like it much, and it didn't seem to have anywhere to go. Today, I changed a few words and made the poem more about an anthropomorphic sun. It brought some life to the poem. I still feel I need to add another verse. I simply have no idea where the poem would go. Anybody have any ideas about what would go in another verse or two, email me at mbt1966@yahoo.com and let me know. Here it is. ENJOY!


The Sun King

 

His rays dissolve the sky’s delights

And liquify his satellites,

And even stellar titans must obey

The coursing of his astral helm

And let Sol rule or overwhelm

Their shrinking light that seeps from far away.

 

Within his system, his great mass

Controls the paths where dreams may pass,

And he creates the colors dreams may wear.

He seeks the words of ancient songs

Once sung to him by fearful throngs

But finds a scornful silence huddled there.


Tomorrow, back to the travelogue. Only two days are left.

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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