The sweet little girls were left briefly in my care. The baby would have none of it: she wanted her own mom and I wouldn’t do. Enter the entertainment committee, aka my sons. Suddenly both baby and her older sister (obscured by a flailing arm here) were enthralled.
The son on the left is the son who is visiting me this week. I inflict this all on you, dear reader, by way of saying that he is the reason I am not much blogging at the moment. I’m just trying to keep up.
“At the end of the day”
you hear people say;
it’s kind of a trend
to invoke the day’s end.
Clichés are so born,
and now I am torn:
how else can I write
of incoming night?
The end of the day
is about shadow play,
puffs pink and white
in slanted late light,
their tippy-toe stretch
to yawn and to catch
that pearly soft ray
at the end of the day.
BACKPACK
The poet trudges,
burdened, bent,
back and forth,
impercipient.
With words that are useless,
that have only weight,
he paces a sameness
in blindered grim gait.
Metaphors, similes,
a crisp interjection,
mere clamorous tonnage,
trash and abjection.
The longer he carries
that lexicon load
the more likely he is
to slowly implode.
The vulture, despair,
the scavenging bird,
starts to descend,
but then comes the word!
The exact, the precise,
in meaning and sound,
arises from somewhere
in mind’s underground!
The foot-weary poet
with jubilant pen
turns face to the wind
to do it again.
And so do we begin National Poetry Month, dear reader, my annual head-scratching of what makes a poem or a poet.
I do not believe that rhyme makes a poem. I try to work in rhyme for two reasons: 1) it narrows my choice of words, a good discipline for a yackety daughter of Eire, and 2) it gives me the giggles, a good tonic.
But poetry does not depend on rhyme; it depends on something else. I can’t define it.
As happens so often, Bill, our intrepid photographer, has captured an image with wonderful layers of meaning. Thanks again, Bill!
Writer’s Lament
I look out the window,
searching the sky,
one vast lumpy cloud
like a wakeful bed
where sleep has been sought,
demons of night manacled,
resisting,
in tangles of blankets.
Just so the sky
in its tumbled, restless look.
No words there.
I search the ground,
cold sticky mud,
chevroned in black stems
cracking in a wind that crawls
on its belly through dead herbs,
pulling useless things.
No words there.
In drawers full of some-days
which become nevers,
no words.
In closets,
epaulets of dust
on heedless hollow shoulders,
I fumble in every pocket,
surprised by gloves
limp and soft, snuggled
like sleeping kittens.
But no words.
In sepulchral boxes
crowded with the mute past,
pages and faces that crumble,
where Then is more alive than Now,
longings, wonderings,
but not one word.
Others wander in this word desert
but it’s a lonesome place.
And so, dear reader, have I tried to grapple with yet another writer’s slump. I figured since I can’t find words to write about anything else, I might as well write about the slump.
When I write the first word of something, I have an idea what the last word will be. What a laugh. Writing has its own idea of where it’s going, and it’s rarely where I thought I was steering it.
Ten years ago, when I was 70, I promised myself I would do two things: learn how to bake biscotti, and start a blog. My writing mate Tamara graciously set up the blog for me, and I began, tentatively, intending to write mostly about caregiving, and hoping to learn how to tell a story. In August of 2015 Tamara prodded me to try photos as prompts. I was hooked.
So, as with all my writing, I did not go where I thought I would.
I’ve always been Oddment(s), but the themes have morphed from “Connections” to “Disconnections” to “Coping” to “Coping, but barely,” all reflective of my life and the life around me.
But the subtitled quest remained: In search of story. I can make biscotti, but I still can’t tell a story.
So I ask myself, “What at 80?”
The table is set,
pristine and inviting,
the menu unknown
as of this writing.
I wish you, dear reader,
a stew of your choice:
a toothsome concoction
for palate and voice,
words for your writing,
health for your soul,
a generous helping
of vision and goal.
May loved ones and muses
fill all the seats,
your fingers and spirit
be ever sticky from sweets.
Thanks yet again to photographer S.W. Berg,
and kudos to The Baker’s Wife Bistro,
Hampton, VA, for the ambience.
I wish you a good year next, dear reader, with my thanks for your presence here, and I dig down to the very last remnants of depleted optimism to express some small hope for peace in our future. I do find our little corners of blogdom are places for peace. Plus a few laughs. Some nostalgia. A touch of snark. Communal sighs. The occasional coffee-spit on the keyboard. Thus is peace had, and I’m most grateful for it. Thank you for helping me bungle through 2022!
Maureen
It has been said —
and I think that it’s true —
for a writer to finish
it always takes two:
the writer declares
“I call it a day,”
but then someone else
must yank her away.
DONE is a word
that’s hard to pronounce
when you invest in your work
to the last little ounce.
So DONE is a laurel
that others bestow,
to help the imaginer
pack up and go
to the next inner road,
or mountain, or sea,
that summons our spirits
by endless decree.
Whether mural or poem,
ballad or quilt,
“done” can be said
without quitter’s guilt.
A writer can spend an idiotic amount of time on one sentence, one phrase, one word. That living, breathing language remains stubbornly imperfect. We don’t want to be quitters in our own eyes, so we keep at it. There’s always something that could be better.
I suspect that can be true for all creative endeavor. The artist, whether writer, muralist, quilter, musician, woodworker, can have a problem saying “it’s done.” But Dathan has said just that, and here, above and below, is the finished mural.
More thanks to photographer and reporter S.W. Berg.
How to go
from here to there,
shape limb and life
from mental air,
to plot a course
that’s rocky, new,
unseen by others,
glimpsed by you,
you must ignore
the self-derision,
hold tight that skittish
imp called vision.
More thanks to photographer S.W. Berg,
and to the unnamed artist,
who sees what I cannot.
A holiday,
a break well earned,
routine and calendar
happily spurned.
All well and good,
but it’s bad news
when the vacationer is
my mercurial muse.
And so I’m stuck
with blank white screen
until she returns
from where she’s been.
OK, so you have to kind of bend the rhyme there at the end. I’m desperate.
She’s gone again! Those of you who know me know my problems with my willful muse. Sometimes she just takes off. But she taunts me with beginnings. I have begun to write several posts over the last ten days or so, and the quality they all have in common is dreadfulness.
Wrath. It is said to be sinful. I think not. There are times when extreme anger is a virtue. OK, so I’m not a moral theologian.
The problem with anger is how it fevers and boils under a tight lid, that lid that bounces and clatters as it tries to hold in the steam pushing up and, inexorably, out. Eventually there is a lava that oozes over, a thick anger, blackened and petrified wherever it congeals. Or the vapor writhes away, leaving only the distilled curls of rage.
Gardeners are lucky. They can scroll the news, public or personal, and immediately grab weapons of grass destruction. Stabbing, wrenching, yanking, soul-satisfying wrath. Crabgrass is therapy. With roots that clutch the deepest core of the earth and blades that hack their way through other life, it bares its coarse green teeth, snarling, daring the gardener to fight to the death.
As a normal thing, I am a proud, peaceful wimp; however, I espouse white-knuckled violence when it comes to crabgrass, and I enthusiastically endorse wrathful gardening.
Practicing prose poetry. And apparently alliteration. (Do any of you find yourselves writing/talking/muttering to yourselves in alliterative words? It’s scary.)
Oddments 