Notes: I downloaded a magnetic poetry app that allows me to create my own words and use my own pics. It’s one way I can coax my absent muse into playing along. Other than my name, I only used words included in the app. I did change tenses.
Garden Nonsense
Shattering grackles
flash like obsidian
until darkness swallows fecund graves.
Drums keen between strips of wailing roots
surrounding translucent grubs
that emerge as Japanese beetles
and eat every damn grape leaf in town.
Not to mention roses.
It’s a sign, I tell you.
Times are tight.
Brenda Warren 2016
Japanese Beetles in Action 2015
Visit The Sunday Whirl
Piggy the Wonder Dog
Get away from me you dumb flipping dog.
You circle around with your stinky oozing paw, limping.
The floor recoils from your touch.
You are oil to my water.
Piggy the Wonder Dog. You used to jump through
hula hoops in a single bound, sporting that Mohawk
like nobody’s business. Looking so fine, like a circus dog.
What is he? people would ask. ‘e’s a Dingo! we’d say.
Jonesing to ride a monkey’s back into somebody’s notice me life,
insistent like rain that won’t let up.
You make me want to shoot you in the head.
Fireworks.
Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?
You are our escape from reality
and no one wants you to die.
I imagine playing with you when you were a puppy.
We could have gone camping to Yellowstone
or chased our dreams across Hill 57.
Brenda Warren 2016
Piggy the Wonder Dog 2015
If you want to see the prompt that brought me here visit Elizabeth’s 1sojournal. Piggy deserves a long story, and one of these days he will get one. He is still here, but age and infirmities complicate things for him.
Blink
Maybe it was a mistake to stop breathing,
to audibly gasp at absurdity.
Death needs no reason
to creep its rattle up your throat
and turn you into glue
like so many spent horses.
Blink.
Brenda Warren 2016
Giving Chase
Stretching toward tedium, I look out the window.
Squirrels run across the stones outlining my flowerbed—
pieces of petrified wood that hold ancient secrets,
old stories that rattle with feather and song.
Thomas Little Shell looked out the hole of a sweat lodge where his friend
walked toward an aspen grove before the edge of sight.
Thomas blinked and a deer was there, blinking back at him.
It lifted its chin toward Thomas, then vanished beyond the grove.
Pieces of petrified wood carry lost stories and whisper
against the rain of forgotten years.
I am the stones that line my garden. I am Thomas. I am the deer.
It is April and it rains all day.
Mary Oliver wrote of rain. and stone. and deer.
I remember holding her tree filled with stars.
I am the stars. I am that tree. I am Mary Oliver. I am rain.
I am dreaming. Away from this garden, I fly. Above
this poem rising from petrified forests morphing into deer
where squirrels give chase to stories past my window.
Brenda Warren 2016
Notes: The block announces itself whenever I sit down to write. Today I tackled it with an old prompt that I first used in 2011. It’s strangely convoluted, and grappling with it this morning was both arduous and fun. Of course, I took plenty of liberties with it.
If you feel so inclined, take the prompt and give chase. Let me know if you do. I’d love to see what it helps you produce.
1. A feeling
2. Observe the scenery of your immediate surroundings
3. Personification of an inanimate object
4. Use a metaphor
5. Spend four lines recalling a prominent memory
6. Use symbolism in a statement
7. Associate some form of weather to the feeling in #1
8. Tell a lie, about anything
9. Make a reference to a holiday or season
10. State a fact about a favorite artist or poet
11. Compare yourself to a specific piece from the artist/poet you used in #10
12. Negate the lie you told in #8, or further support or restate it
13. Describe a daydream or parts of a dream you’ve had
14. For the last two lines, refer to a vacationing location
Visit The Sunday Whirl
I’m also writing at Elizabeth’s place this month, where she has been providing helpful daily fodder.
Blocked
Words disappear like toads in underbrush,
croaking and invisible,
protected from above by their thorny destination,
while the soft fertile comfort of ground moss below
caresses their rumbling underbelly of vowels.
Forgetting to form syllables
consonants recline,
forsaking words,
sitting sweet in the deep.
Brenda Warren 2016
iPhone Toad ~ bwarren
Thanks for your gentle suggestions this month, Elizabeth. You are helping me persevere!
At Midnight
at midnight
bad news on the doorstep
fistfuls of purple blooms
birds fell from flight
trees faltered
limbs broke
a mortal forest in flames
no one heard anything
I can’t remember if I cried
birds fell from flight
halfway through that horror
I stopped breathing
he saved me and
we sang dirges in the dark
fistfuls of purple blooms
bad news on the doorstep
at midnight
Brenda Warren 2016
Notes: Elizabeth’s prompt was too dang hard for me, so I went my own route with it as a backbone. Three phrases from American Pie are in this piece: bad news on the doorstep, we sang dirges in the dark, and I can’t remember if I cried. Elizabeth also provided six words we could use in our work. I used halfway, midnight, mortal, purple, and forest.
San San (sans parentheses)(sans little dog)
Dancing with silver spoon, the cradled moon
shines among stars. A nickel for the Milky Way.
A nickel for Cassiopeia.
The Milky Way cuts in to dance with the spoon.
The cradled moon watches them sway.
She shines her glow on the Milky Way dancing.
While spinning their shine by Cassiopeia,
silver spoon laughs at this fancy romancing
(and the little dog bays at the moon).
Brenda Warren 2016
Randolph Caldecott And the Dish Ran Away with the Spoon
Notes: This piece was written to a form called a san san. It was the prompt offered at NaPoWriMo today. In the san san a repetition of phrases or images occurs, and there is an end rhyme pattern, abcabdcd. The line in parentheses violates the form but completes the poem. Today, Elizabeth prompted us to do an exploration of silent messages our parents sent through action, or messages we passed on to our children. She provided Harry Chapin’s Cats in the Cradle for musical inspiration. I decided to create something with a nursery rhyme feel to it. My parents introduced me to nursery rhymes. Their silent message? Love language!
Minstrel: a Haibun
As dawn rises, Minstrel nudges my hand open, hoping for finger scratches up & down her dark brindled neck. She rumbles and curves into my morning flow, while in the background, Peter Ostroushko marries his mandolin to Pandora, stringing fields across morning’s bluing sky. Notes dangle and hum, while Minstrel’s belly thrums.
lilting mandolin
fingers, felines, fields, and sky
morning becomes us
My fingers strum through Minstrel’s brindle as Ostroushko’s lilting strings spread through us, tying us to this land with a strange sense of oneness rising with a jangle through our chests.
Brenda Warren 2016
Notes: I wrote this for Elizabeth’s prompt regarding the role of music in our lives, and for Six Word Wednesday over at The Sunday Whirl.
Minstrel is a fictional cat. Right now we are catless, other than BC, our feral (she’s coming around) Barn Cat.
Visit The Sunday Whirl
Agent Orange, see Defoliants
This poem needs some front loading. The prompt at NaPoWriMo today was to write an index poem. Yes, a poem from the index of a book. My piece uses almost every letter of the alphabet (no Q or X) in order. I used the index from a book called “Shooting War – Photography and the American Experience of Combat,” by Susan D. Moeller. Before you get to the end of the piece let me tell you who the Z is, as I looked him up in the book.
“The effect of Agent Orange . . . was dramatic; trees were stripped of leaves,” recalled Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, Jr., commander of the American in-country naval forces, responsible for the spraying of Agent Orange around navy-patrolled waterways, “thick jungle growth was reduced to twigs, the ground was barren of grass.” (p. 343 Moeller)
Agent Orange, see Defoliants
American soldiers:
fear and,
personal equipment of,
views of enemy among,
Atrocities :
by Americans,
by the enemy,
faked stories of,
Battle fatigue, see Casualties, psychiatric
Casualties:
among civilians,
guidelines on images of,
psychiatric,
C-rations
Dead Americans, images of,
Dead enemy, images of:
with American soldiers,
as piled bodies,
in posed photographs,
Death:
images of moment of,
Defoliants
Ethics, see Morality of war
Film
Glory of war
Horrors of war:
depictions of,
Information, Journalists, Kodak camera
Life and death:
juxtaposition of images of,
Morality of war:
guerrilla tactics and,
killing of civilians and,
poison gas and,
shooting of prisoners and,
unconventional weapons and,
Napalm & Objectivity
Photographers:
addiction to war as motivation for,
compassion and,
sense of responsibility in,
Rifles
Sounds & smells of battles
Trench warfare
“Urgent Fury”
Volunteer Weaponry
Yellow journalism:
images of the dead and,
Zumwalt, Elmo, Jr.
Agent Orange, see defoliants
Brenda Warren 2016
Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington D.C. 4/16 – bwarren
undercaws 