Meeting the Bar: The Unfathomable

Beyond shattered glass,
blood-spattered ash,
and fallen limbs -
Through hateful haze
after fearsome fires -
Still in a daze, a
space of numbness -

between damning curses
and blessing hymns -

is where we must race,
wheel, or crawl -
is where we must travel
alone and together
beyond shattered glass.

I'll look for your face.



Written for Meeting the Bar: Critique and Craft—The Unfathomable— at dVerse Poets. The host this week is Anna Elizabeth Graham, whose prompt post is a thoughtful essay on the poetry of disaster.

Want to give a shout out to the G-Man, with apologies for this 57-word poem not fitting the criteria for Friday Flash 55 this week....

.

Friday Flash 55 & Meeting the Bar: Irony

Drawing by Mark Powell via Tumblr, with this caption:  

‘we are all clowns with too much face paint’ Bic biro drawing on 1880s US citizenship form.

Let's write a mission statement
about the Declaration of Intention
we wish we could plan to complete.
It should be transparent and
indubitably sincere,
certainly not gawdy,
and without deceit —
A manifest to describe
our strategy for invention . . .
if it were prudent, if we
were brave and true,
instead of a bawdy
and bogus tribe.

:::

Written for Friday Flash 55 - My post in exactly 55 words - for the G-Man.

 -ALSO-

Written for Meeting the Bar: Critique and Craft—Just Do What You Don't Mean: Irony— at dVerse Poets. The host this week is Victoria C. Slotto, who invites us "to say what you do not mean. Write something ironic, whether it be tinged with humor or a searing commentary on the state of things."
.

MeetingTheBar: Critique and Craft — Salem, Oregon

  

Salem, Oregon

Absorb Salem in the morning
     steeping in fresh dawn.
It is lush here where spiders thrive.
     Brittle are they who make homes of dreams
     we don't remember weaving through the night.

Some weeds, thorny and stretched,
deserve their space.
     Bitter vibrant blossoms are their compromise
     for pushing out a landscaped place.

A moment is preserved in this valley
where those delicate float on sugared air
     as Salem mornings serve breakfast
     for the soul,
where the green of the land is foremost caressed
     and we are second blessed.

The life of this town is encapsulated now
so a bigcity person must plot carefully
to save the energy morning brings.
     Nightpulse is offered at a slight pace
     and beehive people who cannot dance through
     sunrise feel smothered.

But the secrets found while walking alone
and shaking fronds with a fern half-human size
bring a crazy peaceful prayer to mind.

A waif could be caught here in morning
     leaving at eve
     mothered.

Written for MeetingTheBar: Critique and Craft ~ Oh, the Places we Live! — at dVerse Poets. Pamela Sayers is our host this week. From her beautiful home in Mexico she asks us to write about the places where we live. My poem is an old one, written in 1977 after I first moved from Nevada to Salem, Oregon (the state capitol).

The original title of this poem was "For a Stop-Over Place," because I did not intend to stay long. Ultimately, however, I lived there for eight years before moving on to Portland and then eventually to my beloved Silverton, Oregon, 15-miles away from Salem. (I do not think I could do justice to Silverton in a poem, at least not today.)

Images of Salem and countryside via: Bing
Image of youth in downtown Salem via: Wikipedia

.

Friday Flash 55 & Meeting the Bar: Impressions

Impressions

That secret part of the country road, I know

the pleasure of its narrow curving calling

that broadens my scope — and, as it

meanders, it straightens my thinking.

While hiding streaks of halcyon light

how rolling hills peek back at me! How

the grasses sing into my open windows!

How midsummer forgets every autumn here.

Written for Friday Flash 55 - My post in exactly 55 words - for the G-Man.

-ALSO -

Written for Meeting the Bar: Impressionistic writing— at dVerse Poets. Claudia suggests that we use "loose brush strokes" in creating a poem (click link for her beautiful prompt and great instructions).

.

Friday Flash 55 & Meeting the Bar: Balance • Olympia

Thursday July 26, 03:14 PM
Volunteer Abby Idowu, of London, stretches under the Olympic rings while being photographed by friends on the other side of a hill at Olympic Park prior to the 2012 Summer Olympics, Thursday, July 26, 2012, in London. The opening ceremonies for the games will be held Friday, July 27. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)


Olympia

Discontented mind losing count of deep breaths, three-plus hours past noon:
One person seeking equilibrium amidst unevenness, imbalance.
Upward arched arms making one imperfect circle below
Five offset, yet perfectly steadfast, rings linking five
Frightfully unstable, Lonely Planet co-inhabitants:
Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, Oceania.
Three trees: one tall, one twiggy -
Contented mind losing count.

Written for Friday Flash 55 - My post in exactly 55 words - for the G-Man.

 -ALSO-

Written for Meeting the Bar: Critique and Craft—Balance— at dVerse Poets. At the end of her marvelous post, Victoria C. Slotto prompts us to "play with the concept of balance."

.

Critique and Craft: What's the Buzz • Stuff

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Video runs 2:28. 
Poem's opening quote is at end of clip. 


Stuff

"We won't see these forests coming back in our lifetime,
or even in our grand-children's lifetimes."

And with the report our minds numbed more, nearly
as numb as charred hooves trodding hot embers.

We dulled from the sharpness of
these breaking news flashes,
nearly as breaking as the thunderous thumping
of trunks upon the earth they knew.

A rabbit stood thumping in defiance
near the cave where her young huddled
quivering, the cave where bats were
already dying from White-Nose Syndrome —
All of them now just gray ashes....bunnies,
bats, bears, bucks, birds, batches of berries,
biomass, biodiversity.

After losing their home in the orange-red fury
a family stood before cameras, numb and dulled.

The girl about ten, voice breaking, recalled
her room. "It had a TV, my computer, my
iPod touch, and my phone. I miss my stuff."

                                                                 MLydiaM ~ July 2012


Written for Critique and Craft—What's the Buzz— at dVerse Poets. Chazinator's prompt this week inspires us to write a poem that creates or evokes modern life, in all of its reality. To accomplish this, you might: write a poem that describes the fractured nature if the modern world write a poem that incorporates newspaper clippings or other non-poetic material write a stream-of-consciousness poem transform unpoetic writing into poetry  


More about White-Nose Syndrome at U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

 .

Critique and Craft: Place & Setting in Poetry • Church in Baja

Church in Baja

After crossing the border
and getting beyond Tijuana
the road narrowed. The road opened.
Wide to the imagination, exotic
dreams notwithstanding,
reality withstood the
test of time. Timeless poverty,
endless grace — the tiny village
built on brown dusty land.
Some huts had four walls —
all walls punched out of cardboard
reinforced with scraps of metal, old
patched tires, rolls of barbed wire —
roofs of rusted tin wobbling
atop those rickety frames.

Eyes up. From the desperate flatness
the site of a hill
all tufted with sweet grasses
and sagebrush abloom, a smooth
dirt road leading up, up, out
of the sad village to the smallest church
made of white stucco with no flaws,
a simple solid cross set
onto faded-red tile roof with no holes;
Narrow swept entry with no door
opened onto a hard dirt floor
with room for 30 knees kneeling
closely side-by-side, no benches
facing the adored altar — a small
wood table adorned with delicate
hand-laced cloth, and a bowl
of golden crockery holding water
warmed by the day.

Into the scrubbed stucco wall
an alcove was carved, where
a mosaic candle flickered — mottling
Mary's bleeding son — no stained
glass windows to enhance the passion,
nor needed.

                                       MLydiaM ~ June 2012



Written for Critique and Craft—Where in the World Am I: Place and Setting in Poetry— at dVerse Poets.

.

Critique and Craft: Stream-of-Consciousness Writing • Ghosts

Ghosts

I am collecting ghosts.

Favorite cat was by the porcelain goose on the top

shelf near The Bumper Book, the book that holds

the ghost of my toddler self. I walked by and

smiled that smile that goes inside to me

and not out to the world. Another day, one was

in the bathroom sitting by the Italian sun bust— right

where she sat for my favorite picture of her—white

Feather-fluff, tail wrapped around her toes.

She seems porcelain now too.

There at the same sink I felt a touch so tender
on my elbow tonight—even turned to address my man

but there was no one there. 

Another message from an unknown sender.  

Mama lives in my laptop, the place 

she’d love most if she were still alive.

I’d show her all the tricks and she’d have the

Web mastered in no time, like she mastered

dealing cards, then Business, and quilting, calligraphy,

the art of love, and anything else she put her mind to.

She had no master. 

             Do I? 

Of course not. I am her daughter, the one who cried

in fear of shadows in my bedroom late at night and

nestled against her breast as she held me close—

never-ever saying that I did not

see what I saw. 

                                        MLydiaM ~ May 2012

Written for Critique and Craft—Stream-of-Consciousness Writing at dVerse Poets.

.

Critique and Craft: Machine Dreams • Wings

image via Google


Wings

Awkwardly, stubbornly, you take your flight
        and blotch the sky with your image.
Hungrily you roar a defiance
at more accessible lands,
        a defense of space
                fought in futile scrambled timing.
You eat the clouds,
poisoning the rain they keep
so they dump on us a dead apologetic storm.

Will farmers look on fields of bleached weeds
as science searches new forms of food? —
and will cities branch out farther
in frantic nesting to avoid your thunder? —
and will beaches no longer sing
as ozone protection becomes a myth
and one in four carries oozing sores?

Ah! But what we have gained
by allowing you places to settle . . .
One uncomfortable diplomatic gesture
        never put to vote
has quieted the discord for a sigh
and we live another nightmare.

With weeping eyes and choking breath
        and with unceasing admiration for wings
we hear you first through palm-cupped ears,
                then see you scamper across the dome.

Nursing remaining health
some will ignore your birth —
others will save the thousands
necessary for your tempting luxury moment spree.

But I curse with useless disdain
the smiling Concorde.

                                MLydiaM ~ 1977


Written over three decades ago — in all seriousness then, I might add! — I am submitting this old poem for Critique and Craft—Machine Dreams at dVerse Poets. Thank you to Chazinator for the wildly fun prompt. Although my youthful loathing of the Concorde mellowed some with time, I always did think it was a
Machine Nightmare!

To refresh your memory about the Concorde, see Wikipedia and numerous other sites. Here are key stats from Wikipedia:

             Concorde
Role     Supersonic airliner
First flight     2 March 1969
Introduction     21 January 1976
Retired     26 November 2003
Status     Retired from service


.