Dim It

Posted on by

4

Rage shimmers from the edges of your scowl.
Dark and simmering.
No room for small jokes.
No ringing bells and laughter.
Put your heart on its shelf.
There are plenty of diversions in the corridor.
Kick the dog.
Hang your face like a mirror.
Slam the door.
Stomp your feet a little louder next time.
Dance solo, snuff me out.
Mission: separation.
There is plenty of air in the room,
it just feels stifled
and dim.

Brenda Warren 2016

Notes: No dog was kicked in the writing of this poem. This poem is in response to Elizabeth’s prompt. Along with her prompt, she gave us 6 words, and I picked 6 more from the source song, Hotel California. I used eleven of the words. Candle didn’t light its way into this piece.

dark, shimmering, face, room, candle, dance
air, dim, bell, mission, corridor, plenty

Pandora Spring

Posted on by

11

The inevitability of rain hangs over Pandora
with sighs that release a deluge of weeping clouds.
Outside the window, blossoms push their whiteness
through the pear tree’s burgeoning leaves.
Water bedazzles its branches in shimmering droplets
refracting light into prisms of spring.
In the distance, mist hangs its vaporous cape
to obfuscate the edges of deciduous woods
where critters nuzzle off the edges of morning’s call,
and plants wiggle their way toward the seasons’ coming spoils.
From the barn, the feral cat howls her heat.
Aborting my poem, I phone the vet.

Brenda Warren 2016

BC

napofeature4

Perspectives of You

Posted on by

3

You practical

logical

“reasonable”

puke.

Imagine for an instant

—anything.

Dickery, dickery dare.

Follow a fancy. Dream.

 

You radical

liberal

absurd

little girl.

Namby pamby

puddin’ in pie

those stars in your eyes

solve nothing. Think.

 

Brenda Warren 2016

 

Notes: Along with these six words—practical, logical, reasonable, absurd, liberal, and radical, here Elizabeth’s prompt for today:

Suggestions: Try using a short form for today’s piece. No more than 10 lines. Make up your own short form. Be easy on yourself.

 

My piece has two 8-line stanzas, but it’s short. 

Buzzards over the Blanchard

Posted on by

13

Riding on the surface
of the Blanchard’s never ending flow
we float.

Navigating currents
our paddles dip deep into her body
steering round snags & boulders
through muddied channels
that curve by stands of oak
and fields losing their fallow
to spring’s green hope.

Overhead black vultures circle
searching for death’s delicious rot.

Passing endless eddies
our talk turns to end times,
to decimating epidemics
—apocalyptic tales
about black buzzards circling fields filled
with the bodies of
the last of us—

one big funereal feast
ending there in the bellies
of those black winged birds.

Later, they’ll shit us out,
greasy drips down the useless artifacts
of who we used to be.

Brenda Warren 2016

246

Visit The Sunday Whirl

 

 

A Spacious Open Heart

Posted on by

3

Is it weak to show mercy?
To offer forgiveness?

To make smooth the seams of empty promises,
reality moves out of learning to ask—
relinquishing that trembling of mind,
relinquishing fear of the present moment.

Forgiveness is one way to practice mercy.

Reality moves along outside my door.
I was on to a Buddha image and bowing,
when I remembered.
If you see the Buddha in the street, kill him.

Acknowledge oneness.
Abandon delusion through beginning to yield.

Holding on feels brittle, narrow, and confined
like a tight fist, clinging to resentment,
clinging to separation.

There’s a tenderness, a trembling in forgiveness,
a giving that cuts through change,
creating space.
It’s a celebration.
In a single act of opening one’s heart,
brightness grows.

Brenda Warren 2016

image

Notes: Elizabeth offered a prompt to write about mercy this morning. Lion’s Roar offers several articles by Buddhist teachers online, so I steeped myself in Buddhism to feed my muse before embarking on this write about mercy.

 

Breathe

Posted on by

5

Habits are running late.
Relax.
You are so hard with your discursive mind.
Take three conscious breaths.
Let it be where you pause.
That gap, when you are stuck.
Drop your discursive mind.
Take three conscious breaths.
Just pause.
Be where you are,
Even if you find yourself.
Receive place with the immediacy
of sacredness.
Create that gap.
Three conscious breaths.
Just pause.
Let it be an open doorway.
Right there.
You are strong.

Breathe.

Brenda Warren 2016

buddhas

Garden of One Thousand Buddhas   ~   BWarren

Notes: Elizabeth freed us up from prompts so we could revisit an old poem, or… ? I took this opportunity to play with some text manipulation tools. Bonsai is a site where you can enter text, and it cuts it up and regenerates it into something else. I entered an article by Pema Chodron, then copied the mixed up results into my word document. From there, I used the black highlighting tool to “erase” big chunks of text. The finished poem, Breathe, is in the word order that I received at Bonsai, I just formatted it with phrasing and line breaks. The only word I added is breathe both as title and final word.

It was an interesting exercise, and the Bonsai tools are free. Check it out!

 

Blaming the Victim: a Tritina

Posted on by

7

Her feelings aren’t in dispute.
How much did she have to drink?
Silence the victim numb with blame.

Shame will color dark that blame,
Her facts and slut skirt in dispute.
Ply your prey with parties and drink,

possibly plop a pill in her drink.
Fever the horizon with blame
so “stop” can be in dispute.

Dispute her blame with drink and shame.

Brenda Warren 2016

Notes: Feeling in a rut this seventh day of April, I decided to watch a documentary movie, and fit it to both Elizabeth’s prompt, and the prompt at NaPo.

NaPo prompted a poem in the form of a tritina. This consists of three tercets with repeating end words in the pattern, ABC, CAB, BCA. The tritina is finished with all three end words contained in a single line.

The documentary I watched on Netflix was The Hunting Ground. It is about the crisis of rape on college campuses. My feelings of anger and indignation after viewing this film, felt constrained by the tritina form. For me, anger is often well served with a villanelle or a pantoum.

napofeature4

Spiderword Triversen

Posted on by

12

Spider webs hang their silk like cobs
from splintered stalks of sentences
that wonder where words went wrong.

Trapped in thick thread they struggle
to capture the cadence of chaotic rain
that drenches dreams in drowning.

Silver scissors shear through shrouds,
releasing clear sprays of syllables,
luminescing like the feathers on a grackle’s neck.

Purple then black then blue they shine
swirling pieces of soul pushed like silk
through a spider’s deep duct spinneret.

Brenda Warren 2016

Notes: A poem didn’t magically appear today. It was a struggle, so I turned to a poetic form. A triversen is written in tercets, or three line stanzas. Each tercet is a sentence. The first line should be an observation or fact, while the following two lines are used to set the tone, imply an associated idea, or carry a metaphor for the original statement. A triversen should also carry the rhythm of human speech having 1 to 4 stresses per line. Use alliteration.

Elizabeth provided six words for today, along with a prompt. The words are also posted at The Sunday Whirl. This piece is not written to prompt, but it was fun to try a triversen again.

Wed1

Visit The Sunday Whirl

Magnetic Poetry 2 / Day 5

Posted on by

4

image

Notes: You can create magnetic poetry online here. For today’s prompt, Elizabeth had us listen to Billy Joel’s song “My Life” and pick a phrase from it to drive our poem. I selected “on my time,” and was fortunate to find the words in the online poetry kit. It’s fun to play with magnetic poetry. This is not something I’d have written without it.