This old blind hound dog
expresses enough gratitude
to smooth stones.
~bw 22
Day Eleven. Something big.
Tank
Tag Archives: April22
Cracked not Broken
Slivers of breath sent her plans clattering through to
that place
where nothing ever mattered but now.
How did the light dim?
Where did her angels go?
Dancing on pins,
deep , where secrets whisper,
they move through the crack in her everything.
Light against dark –
tracing paths to summon themselves.
Nothing works like it used to.
When she walks, feathers fall from her feet.
She laughs.
~bw 22
Day Ten — off prompt. This one came after I tried to construct a cento from some of my older poems. While pieces of other poems are present, this is not what I expected to write. Like so many poems, it became itself.
there but for the grace of gods
The dead man chased answers to neurotically contrived questions
budding flowers blossomed, then withered in his wake
There were bugs writhing inside his skull
They ate pieces of his brain
He heard from inside out
Everything he remembered disappeared
Answers tricked him
riddles — forever
unsolved
~bw 22
Day Nine asked for a nonet. 9 words per line, 8 words, 7 words . . .
That Crow
Hold that image—
fast, before it fades
to fog, to
dreams not remembered.
For many days
if a crow caws, its
dreams nudge her, the roll of a
die that makes
life feel fragile, maybe it
is fragile, like that image,
a crow
broken-winged, strutting across an old stone wall, a
bird that swallowed her whole
that crow from her dreams, that crow that
cannot
fly.
~bw 22
Day Six prompted us to write a variation of an acrostic poem. The first word of each line in this piece is from the first stanza of Dreams by Langston Hughes. This one didn’t come easy, but it is my sixth.
An Ogre in the Oval Office
Buffoon
Charlatan
Evil grenade
Incited to rage when his henchmen strayed
Voters ignored his plea to succeed
So he growled and howled
And still tried to lead
The desperate, evil, racist brigade
Egged on by himself,
The orange grenade
This ogre, this reptile, this stain in our eye
Promoted a huge election lie
Designed to retain him
Designed to en-reign him
Designed to make him the king we denied
Witnessing horror abroad on tv
I’m counting our blessings that we removed he
who will not be named
~bw 22
Day Five asked us to write about a mythical creature doing something unusual. I wish this creature was mythical, and hope he fades away to nothing more than a smudge on our democratic republic.
Poetry Prompt
1. Open your laptop
2. Drop in Billy Collins’ mouse and watch it
3. delete everything you wrote last week then
4. recreate words from its footprints
5. Accuse the words of lying
6. Fan them with a bellows until they blow off the screen and
7. land behind your eyes
8. When the words form tears
9. remember they are only mouse droppings
10. lying beneath the lines of your poem
~bw 22
The Napo prompt for Day Four suggested a poem in the form of a poetry prompt.
She believes God was in the trees.
“The bones of the dead
are excavated, scattered, and sold.
Shrines are blasted from sacred
rock in the name of patriotism.”
-Tiffany Midge “Night of the Living Dead”
She follows patterns of shadows
that dance across the wall
lengthening dusk toward the
closet, where high on a shelf she rattles
the bones of the dead.
Culled from forest floors
each bone holds the secrets of
stardust tracing lines within a void.
She misses the trees
where patterns of shadows, like bones,
are excavated, scattered, and sold.
Her dad said trees were sentinels of time
always watching. She believes that trees
held stories forever remote and inaccessible
bulldozed by the highest bidder,
gone.
Shrines are blasted from sacred
places where patterns of shadows
no longer fall. She opens the box of bones
and inhales the forest floor grateful for
secrets and shovels. Grateful for her bravery
against the movement to destroy what’s gone
where every lie was a
rock in the name of patriotism.
~bw 22
Glosa One
Fleetings
Your body was your temple of doom. Your body was your
crutch. Your body drove your death to the front of that
truck on Montana 200. I imagine you cackled as you
flew through the air finally cheating life of itself and
you.
If the dead could talk would you whisper or scream?
Last night in a dream a song about angels fell from your
fingers and landed on Evel’s soft padded paw tap tap tapping
my face awake. Months have passed with no thought of your
life flashing before your eyes. Then a poem about bodies inspires
dreams of fingers and angels and somehow you are
here.
~bw 22
Using Napo’s day one and day two prompts, I wrote this prose poem. From day two’s prompt, I used a word from Haggard Hawks’ Twitter feed for the title. Fleetings are animal tracks or footprints left in the snow. A bit of poetic license at play here. I thought about powdery snow and how quickly it blows away. And how my hand went to my cheek when the cat’s insistence woke me. And how the poetic process brought a friend long gone to a dream. Poof.
undercaws 