Day 13: Emily Dickinson

The Formidable Emily

Today’s poem — or attempt at a poem — is an homage to Emily Dickinson.  Emily as mother…of my fourteen year old?

Here’s her original:

I like a look of Agony,
Because I know it’s true —
Men do not sham Convulsion,
Nor simulate, a Throe —

The Eyes glaze once — and that is Death —
Impossible to feign
The Beads upon the Forehead
By homely Anguish strung.

And mine:

She likes a look of Agony,
It’s the truest look she knows —
The boys that text
My girl, no likelihood to throw —

Her eyes roll up — I guess that’s No —
Cooperation not her fight
And the purple highlights in her hair
So gorgeous in a snit.

*

Smiley face here.  (Remember, it doesn’t have to be good.)

An Inappropriate Poem

Sharon Olds

“If writing is your practice, the only way to fail is not to write.” -Gail Sher

My assignment today is to write an inappropriate poem. Keep it PG, Chris said, and, Don’t tell me you don’t know what I mean.

Here’s my attempt.

Told to write an inappropriate poem, I begin thinking about sex,
and then I think, no, 
and so I have to wonder what else might be
inappropriate enough to satisfy my instructor, who,
after all, is invisible, some guy on the Internet
throwing out suggestions all month long. And I think of comparisons
to how he throws out these suggestions,
maybe to 14-year-old boys
and masturbation, and then I blush,
and I try to keep on the track of what else might be inappropriate.
Anger, maybe, of which I have an especially large store,
or maybe those awful your-mother jokes
that my teenagers and their friends like to tell.

And then self-pity shows up and I remember how sorry
I was feeling for myself
just this morning, how, just as my self-pity crested, a wave of self-pity
because I have a broken ankle, because I have to use
these damn crutches, I opened the newspaper and found a story
about a young mother caught in a landslide,
her ankles broken, her arm broken,
trapped, and even so clutching her baby to her chest
and screaming herself hoarse, for hours,
until they were rescued.
I would like to say that my response was a simple awe
at her, and prayers for her, or even a quick check on my own children,
but instead —  I wallowed in even more self-pity, sorry for myself
for being such a pathetic excuse for a human being,

and right now I am wishing I had just buckled down to it,
and written a really rip-roaring, inappropriate poem about sex.

*

Pretty pathetic beside Sharon Olds and her “Ode to a Douchebag.” (Click on the link to hear her read a truly inappropriate, and hilarious poem.)

The Ekphrastic Poem

 

not my batik, by the way, but an image from shutterstock.com

POETRYisEVERTHING‘s prompt for day 9 is to write an Ekphrastic poem, a poem based on a painting or another art form. As Chris explains, the ekphrastic poem can be a response to a painting, or it can give a painting a voice. To read more, you might check out a handout that I found at readwritethink.org.

I make no claims for this. Long day. Long nap in the afternoon.

Keeping the Lights on Late

The batik of the blue city with its orange lights,
its dark moon in a cracked white sky

has hung on the wall of every house I’ve lived in
for 30 years. My older daughters, when toddlers, tore it

from its frame one afternoon while I made their lunch.
Now it’s high up, unassailable,

in the two-story entry. On top of its highest tower,
a lightning rod draws the eye. There are no people ambling

the grid of the streets. But the windows are lit–
writers awake all night, scribbling.

Day 6 / Poem 6

annie cat2So my job this month is to write a poem a day and I’m encouraging you to write, too. It doesn’t have to be good.

Today’s assignment (at POETRYisEVERYTHING) was to write about the name of a pet.

The Pet Cemetery’s First Citizen

Turtle (1998-2003)

The tortoiseshell cat, taken in as a tiny kitten, a furball
with a very loud purr, named Turtle 

(which delighted the children, themselves tiny back then,
and, in their own way, very loud).

Much beloved.

*

I don’t have a picture (on this computer) of Turtle, so I’m posting one of our current “top cat,” Annie-Cat. (Long story about her name.)

Searching for pet poems, I found Maria Popova’s website, Brain Pickings, with a post titled, “Literary Pets: the Cats, Dogs, and Birds Famous Authors Loved.” I hope you’ll enjoy it, too.