Day 2 napowrimo2019

(Using the official prompt)

It's not courtship it's just talking
Except that underneath the chatter
In the air holds meaning and the fat
Brown bird high breasted pulls joyant
In the straw within the garden
His head down sticking up on nest
His tail feathers Bob even filled
With hope. Not wishing to disturb
I leave him to it take the other door
Instead.

The air aware with chatter everything
Is calling out in not quite spring
The neighbours talk in Hindi
Big voiced rounded proud of their
New extension and the garden just
Right waiting for the guests
Who are exploring and admiring
Ready for the party
in the summer when it comes
Not wishing to disturb them
I hide within the shelter of the wall
And breathe

And the mother scolds her child who
Runs ahead too bold glowing in the waiting
To be old enough to cross the road
And the child is ready for orange juice
And biscuit and delighted with the story
Of the friend from school that day
And stomping like a dragon and
Planning swings and sunshine and
Not wishing to disturb them
I step out into the road to let
them pass

Day 1

Lune

A grey cobweb hangs
Broken threads
Within the old home

Invisible light
Until a
Ray is caught within

A Web too fragile
For a fly
Can still hold photons

Erasure

That was a tricky monkey!

Exorcisms of mind

 
The womb of art is mind

The gods

Are human intelligence

Minds:

Gods, behind the scenes

Day 9: palinode

A palinode is a retraction of an earlier poem. It would have been neater to do this with a poem I already wrote for napo this year, but I couldn’t make it work. So I've written a reyraction to a poem I wrote as a teenager instead (largerly cos I have changed my mind on it over the years). The teen poem is first and the retraction second

No Compromise
I won't compromise, I won't compromise at all
I will fly and I will soar
I will touch the stars
And I will pocket them
And if I fall, then the ground will break my bones
But understand the ground
Is only there
To stop you falling further

A Compromise
I will compromise, there is no weakness
In learning how to swim
Flowing with the currents
Took me to sideways places
Flexible and motile, darting, changing
The stars reflected all around -
Suspended in my element
There are more directions
Than simply up and down

Day 8:money

Money

Money makes the world go round and rather
Than stop its spin and have the plates fall
It's time to swallow all my foolish dreams and
Grow up tall and hunt for money in the bushes
And the bayou and the monied monkey haunts
Lay out wires across the pathways of the jungle
To catch me wild money, tumbling into pits
I dugged in levy floors and covered with an inch
Of bracken - wild money howling lowd and lewd
In earthen holes with wide eyed owls and snakes
Get me down that twelve-bore-wide-boy
Today we hunt for money perched on trees
Flying green across the moon. Catch it
Stun it. Put it in a zoo. Maybe it isn't money
That I'm thinking of -- but parrots, or wasps
Actually this poem isn't about money, but
Something else entirely -- so there.

Day five : Emily Dickinson rewrite

Regrettably I know huge swarths of Emily Dickinson by heart.   479:Because I could not stop for death, has always bothered me
This parody would work better a little longer (something needs to be said about her bloody tippet for a start) , but I'm racing to catch up with the prompts.

Because I Could not stop for Death

Because I could not stop for Death
I became a zombie bride --
And spent the rest of time
Riding shotgun by his side

The horses heads went onwards
Racing towards the sun
He repeated every joke he knew
-- Each and every one

Forever dragged forever
I bored of him -- he tired of me
I wish I'd chosen quiet death
-- Not this eternity

Belated Day 3 : fourteener (not iambic heptameter, cos I can't do meter)

Black Venn

These blackened cliffs are made of mud and walking to the ocean,
And so unspill with every step the unremembered dead;
Thrown out -- like breaths, the memories of a shallow sea,
That pooled in lapping silence o'er this tepid shelf of life.
All brought to fecund flower in one vital summer's heat
That lasted for a chron; two hundred million years ago
Bouyant with benthonic grace in the Tethys dying swell -

-- Here the bold Atlantic came to birth and rude aborning
Ripped continents apart. Opened with a midwife's knife
The mid atlantic ridge strides high, splits plates asunder
And sets land sailing, breaking, drifting, dancing to the north.
Submerged, subsumed, growing, scaling, dipping, twisting, changing.
Rising from the depths,  climbing from the ocean that obscured,
Waters fall before them and these cliffs walk up towards sky.

Oceans find new paths; families and orders rise and fall;
Birds wheel noisy in the heavens, fish drift quiet in shoals.
Deserts race with earnest drought, blink with angry heat, blow out, die;
And softened summers bend their backs to winter's frantic scolds,
And deep within these banks are laid the bones of creatures strange
Who shall not swim these seas again, whose days are long gone past;
Whose memories are faded save for those the black cliffs hold;

Walking, burdened with time: they pace slowly, surely onwards
To an ocean born of change, disruptive of their aeon.
They bear no malice, merely old memories to unload;
Spewing forth the dead upon the sand -- their own digested skin
Tasted and spat out by the ever hungry churning waves;
They walk, they pace, they stumble towards the ancient new
Spill forth their sacrifice, bend down before the present.
Proud in these final dying moments. They forget --  release