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
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.
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
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
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.
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
Visit The Sunday Whirl
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
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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