Day 10 - 30 Poems in 30 Days

NaPoWriMo Assignment - Day 10: Once upon a time, poetry was regularly used in advertisements, most notably the Burma-Shave ads:  Today's, challenge is to write your own advertisement-poem. You don’t need to advertise Burma-Shave. Any product (or idea) will do. Perhaps you could write a poem advertising poetry? It certainly could use the publicity!

 

Pause For Poetry

Sometimes we want to pause and breathe

Pay homage to a blooming tree.
To know that we are not alone
To feel some words down in our bones.
We need to send our love or loss
To leave this world of hard chaos.
So take a little time today
And tell us what you have to say.
To live a life above ho-hum
Just stop and read, or write a poem.

Day 9 - 30 Poems in 20 Days

Sorrow’s Room

So here I am again, in this old room of grief

cluttered with teacups, creased and tinted photographs,
lace-edged handkerchiefs, stories so faded my children
can’t hear how they sing in the corners,
can’t remember who said what.

I thumb the lives I walked beside,
the ones who bounced me on firm knees,
kissed my cuts and bruises, my cheek, my forehead,
my always anxious lips. My mother’s son, and mine,
that left before we saw their faces.

I need hip-boots to slosh the flood of tears gathered

in tissues, pillow cases, quilts, on the shoulders of
friends and strangers.  I come raw again into this chamber
sob for what I did or didn’t say, for who I did or didn’t touch,
for the unanswered letter tucked deep in the drawer.

Day 8 - 30 Poems in 30 Days

Frying Pan Poetry

A universe of adjectives waits for the verbs of passion,

forgiveness, solidarity, living and lust – words that twist themselves
over dark highways, through the green vines of dusk,
into the cluttered bedrooms and dens of living.
Lexicons that spiral into a torrent, scatter themselves upon animals,
the thin skin of the dying and the newborn,

the fragile bones of the forgotten, the full lips of longing,

the altars of what we can’t forget, the hastened prayers
let loose in the torture of desire, the whiskey tinge of need.
All these come and go, hop a boxcar bound for tomorrow’s promise.
Patient as spring daffodils, urgent as labor they ready themselves
to jump into the frying pan of poetry

Somewhere there is a poet - deep in the margins of life

who wades morning and midnight, wears a shawl of uncertainty
lunges toward the yellow paper that waits like a hungry animal,
like ice cream, watermelon, chocolate, soup beans and lard-fried potatoes.
A page to be consumed by the ink of life that scrawls the past and present
as it scratches for a way toward tomorrow, toward an unwritten bible.