Month: May 2024

Can’t Stand the Rain…

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We sit under the tin roofed veranda
as far back from the splattering waterfall
falling from the rusty edge
into the sodden road before us

Every few minute the dog
keeping us company “ahems”
or “harrumphs” to express his
boredom and disapproval of
the ceaseless deluge.

The drip-drip intensifies
to a rat-tat-tat
heralded with a crack
of lightning overhead

The dog whines and
covers his eyes with a paw
yet peeping out spots
a desperate rat swimming past
a deep throated growl precedes

his leaping forth with a splash
the dog obscures his target
frantic ripples quickly
flattened by the rain

Returning to our side
shivering and shuddering
the dog slinks away at a shout
from the house owner – our host
No good stray he mutters

Tina Turner’s singing
I Can’t Stand the Rain
is now an earworm
the novelty of monsoon washed away…

© Andrew Wilson, 2024

Over at the Poets Pub our host Björn Rudberg (brudberg) in Meeting the Bar: Critique and Craft challenges us to write using as much Onomatopoeia as possible to enhance the sound of our poem…

Alice Blue Gown

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I fell in love with Alice
no, not Alice in Wonderland
nor through the looking glass
though this Alice famously
admired her reflection
in shop windows
as she walked down the town.

She was not the girl next door
eponymous heroine of the
bereft Smokie who
could not face a life without her
nor the Alice in the driving
White Rabbit pounded out
by Jefferson Airplane –
rather it was
the plaintive harmonies
of the McGarrigle sisters
reviving a parlour song
about a young girl
wearing her favourite blue gown
for the first time.

Little did I know that
this Alice was no homely teenager
but an American Princess
daughter of a President
denied her name for the tragic
loss of her mother due to childbirth
her father, Teddy, unable to bear
his newborn daughter’s namesake
she was condemned to be called
Baby Lee until years later
her father soothed by
a new wife and five more children.

A feisty girl and woman
Alice Roosevelt smoked
and shot at Telegraph poles
from moving trains
but I prefer to think of
the gentler image of
the girl in the song in her
Alice Blue Gown
“Till wilted I wore it
I’ll always adore it
My sweet little Alice blue gown…”

© Andrew Wilson, 2024

Alice Roosevelt was larger-than-life character whose story you can read here. Many notable witticisms are attributed to her.

Written for dVerse Poets Pub Posted by merrildsmith in Poetics

Darkness

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The boy in the darkened room
is trapped in the lifeboat of his bed
he daren’t put his feet to the floor
fearing the deeper darkness
beneath the bed
teeth or claws or
something squelchy
might suck him under
he sleeps fitfully till daylight

© Andrew Wilson, 2024

Over at dVerse Poets Pub,  paeansunplugged in Quadrille, Uncategorized, challenged us to write a poem about Darkness in just 44 words…

Lament

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As cold black darkness deepens the unlit sky
fire idles, stilling, while a dream stumbles forth
to think the world no longer cast your spark.

In the junk shop of life
you crazy paved a path through life
no prismed rainbows colours remain

Stood at the cusp of morning
I walk on clouds, I write about love
– Poetry is sadness

Oh but the birds they would not hush
today as I walked – feeling alone
fantasies of you, real – full blown

Remember then no one’s seen eternity
everything is ephemeral
The way ahead, bowing on one knee, facing north

We all have endurance limits
– with these words of sad regret
peace wraps itself around me

Before the hours to be shouldered
– my resting place
I take it as a purpose of existence

Never lending ourselves to thinking that sadness is poetry

© Andrew Wilson, 2024

Written for Melissa Lemay in Uncategorized over at dVerse Poets Pub, but unfortunately, I missed the boat for Mr Linky and so I am posting it on OpenLinkNight hosted by  Mish… Melissa’s challenge was to write a Cento poem made up from lines of other pub-goers in the month of April which I misread and chose lines from the May “Magic 9” – Es la Vida…

This Cento draws lines from fellow poets at dVerse Poets Pub – Punam, Sunra Rainz, Laura Bloomsbury, Kim M. Russel, Jane Dougherty, Gillena Cox, Mary Grace Guevara, Melissa Lemay, Helen, Robbie Eaton Cheadle, Judy Dykstra- Brown, Reena Saxena, Paul Vincent Canon

Magic 9 and the A-Z

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                       I

In April the Challenge is A-Z
other writing takes a back seat
writing my blog fills my head
and for this year I double dipped
two A-Z themes I interbred
 –  I wrote about Commodities and
with a poem drove home what I said
but now the challenge is complete
it’s normal service in my head…

                       II

Back to the novel and down to the
pub – the dVerse Poets Pub that is
to virtual friends, poets all like me
it’s not, however, all about the likes
but novels, blogging or poems we
certainly desire to be well-read
but truly I must write for me
the itch induces constant scratches
– if that is you too please comment and like me…

© Andrew Wilson, 2024

This picture was first posted with a poem to celebrate the 12th Anniversary of the Poets Pub…

Written for Grace in Poetry Forms over at dVerse Poets Pub who today invites us to use the Magic 9 poetic form whose rhyme scheme is derived from the word abracadabra – I have taken the liberty of using the form as a stanza form as I wasn’t done after a mere nine lines…

You can find my A-Z on Commodities with 26 poetry forms via the button at the top of the page and more of my poems via the Poems button.

Roadtrip Review N0. 2

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If you have not been following this blog for the last month of April, I have been participating in the A-Z Challenge in which participants write alphabetically on a topic of their choosing. Writing is only half the story – with some 218 participants, the idea is to read the blogs of old friends and newcomers alike and if you don’t manage to do that during April, then the Roadtrip that follows in May is the chance to see what everybody else has been up to…

Ronel the Mythmaker besides being the splendid Graphic Designer who furnished the A-Z Challenge 2024 with all its banners and letters this year, Ronel is a writer whose books deal with the Fae or fairy world and for her own A-Z this year, she has given us as compendious a guide to all the forms of the Fae in world folklore. Ronel lives in South Africa and I find it hard to imagine that in that land of bright sunshine and big skies, there lives a soul whose fascination with the Fae, have led her to explore the often dark side of folklore but that she has! Everything you might want to know about the creatures of the Fae but never dared to ask… As well as her writing and graphics, Ronel is a mistress of the dark arts of all digital media including sound, and illustrates her posts copiously, including the one I have linked to – Dark Fae: Ghouls…

By Sarah is a blog by Sarah Whiley from Australia and she must post late at night for she often pops up in my Jetpack app just as I, am getting up. She posts poems and photographs each of which, incrementally reveals the character and life of the eponymous Sarah. I don’t always comment on her posts some, like the photograph below for “Wordless Wednesdays” do not require an answer, but often a comment has followed hard on the heels of Sarah posting – winging its way from and to the antipodes by the miracle of modern technology. Sarah has become part of my life and her photographic theme for A-Z 2024 was about corners – corners of things and things found in corners – dip into Sarah’s quirky view of the world…

https://bysarahwhiley.wordpress.com/2024/05/08/wordless-wednesday-8-5-24/

The Multicoloured Diary is a blog by Zalka Csenge Virág Storyteller from Hungary and is another one dealing with Folklore from around the world. I enjoyed Zalka’s previous A-Zs so this was like connecting with an old friend. This year the theme was Romance tropes in Folklore and like Ronel, Zalka is compendious in her research and posting – despite the fact that she had family issues pulling at her, Zalke finished the challenge in flying form once more…

Roadtrip Review No.1

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If you have not been following this blog for the last month of April, I have been participating in the A-Z Challenge in which participants write alphabetically on a topic of their choosing. Writing is only half the story – with some 218 participants, the idea is to read the blogs of old friends and newcomers alike and if you don’t manage to do that during April, then the Roadtrip that follows in May is the chance to see what everybody else has been up to…

DID we write

One of the questions that the organisers ask in their prompt for the Reflections post that follows reaching the letter Z, is whether you invited or encouraged anyone else to join the challenge and though I didn’t invite, I did encourage a friend who had seen my post on day one of the challenge and who decided to participate. Some years ago, before Covid, one of my grandsons had his first gig as a rapper at a venue in Sheffield. The venue also contained some studios where various alternative medicine practitioners were offering treatment. My partner had a massage from a lady called Amber but over the intervening years, Amber has become aware that she has a DID system and that she has multiple identities and she has chosen to write about Dissociative Identity Disorder on her blog DID we write. If you know anything about DID or if you choose to read this extaordinarily brave and complex description of what it is to have DID, then you will realise how dificult a subject it is to write about.

Dissociative Identity Disorder is a response to childhood trauma – usually physical or sexual abuse whereby the child takes themselves into some part of the mind where they are disociated from what is happening to their body. The more trauma occurs and the more dissociation takes place – the more practised the child becomes and the places they take themselves may become identities in their own right and which may remain hidden in the psyche or may emerge later in life in what is known as a “system” of co-existing personalities. This is what happened to Amber and she writes as two identities, Mia and Berlou, who have created these very cogent posts to which I will refer you – for they explain it far better than I possibly can.

What I will say, is that to have DID and to write about it is extremely dificult and one of the dificulties, is that beyond Mia and Berlou, there are some “littles” who find the passion and intensity of Mia and Belou’s writing very dificult to put up with and protested to the point where Mia and Berlou had to take a break, and so their challenge has so far reached only “I” but that does not mean they are finished writing. Like marathon runners at the back of the pack, they are determined to finish the course eventually, so do not go home thinking it is all over, but visit, cheer on with comments and most of all, take the chance to understand an extraordinary, but commoner than you may think, condition…

The A-Z Blogging Challenge – A for Amber
B for Berlou
C for Change.
D for Diagnosis
E for Existing
F for Fronting and Forgetting
G for Grief
H for Healing and Hiatuses
I: Who is the ‘I’ in DID? 

There will be more posts, both from Mia Berlou but also form myself as I do the Roadtrip, but I wanted to dedicate this first Review exclusively to an extraordiary Challenge…

A-Z Challenge 2024 Reflections Post

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For a list of all my A-Z posts click the A-Z 2024 Menu Button at top or go back in time with 2020 – 2023…

I already began the process of reflection on my 2024 A-Z Challenge in my X is for eXigesis post – that being my way around the lack of an X commodity so I will cover slightly different ground here. To my mind, there would be no point in setting out on the journey which is A- Z, if I were to pick a theme about which I was so well versed that there was nothing to be learned by me too! If that were the case then I doubt whether the writing would be as compelling as I hope it has been for each of the years I have participated -five now… I like to learn new things and I feel that my excitement informs the writing. For example, I learned at school, about the theft of rubber plants that broke the Brasilian monopoly on Rubber and I had read a book called “Genocide” about the Belgian atrocities in the Congo, but somehow it all came together in a more insightful way in my “R” post – and those insights into the history of empires, geo-politics, and the drivers of economics were repeated time after time with the story of different commodities.

Vintage illustrated collectible tobacco card from the Products of the World series published in 1909 by John Player and Sons Cigarettes, depicting agricultural exports and natural resources of world cultures and countries, here with two Indian workers tapping sap from a rubber tree, the first step in the mass production of rubber (Photo by Nextrecord Archives/Getty Images).

Talking of “well versed” – I made it a double challenge this year by writing a poem – also with an alphabetically matching form following a plunge into poetry after the 2023 A-Z which saw a lot of poets visiting my site and I have certainly had my poetic mind stretched by this exercise. I feel I can understand what it might be like to be a Poet Laureate and to have to deliver poems on demand on unlikely or difficult sources of inspiration – Royal Weddings, Openings and Deaths… Many poets online write to all sorts of prompts every day (and I know some who write to several each day) but if the muse don’t move you – you don’t have to do it – this poetic challenge on the other hand, was determined by the intersection of the commodity and the poetry form of the day and so included a Haiku about Heating Oil, an Ideogramme about Investment and a Pylon Poem poem about Palladium!

Palladium

Each year since my 2020 pantsing it debut in A-Z (I only discovered it on April 1st) I have vowed to have all my posts pre-prepared and this year I was halfway there at the start of the month and had the last post finished two days ahead of time with only finishing touches like links to other posts to be done the night before – but one thing I simply forgot to do this year, was to use the daily letters at the top of the page which is a shame because Ronel did an excellent job of creating them and indeed all the graphics this year – I will do better next year and I see that the graphic for the 2025 Theme Reveal is already designed! So yes I will be back – all being well, and I already have a theme planned for 2025…

I enjoyed the visits of the team who were supportive as always and of course it was a joy to visit and be visited by others on the Challenge and I will be reviewing them and others I intend to visit now that the madness of April is over – in Roadtrip posts. One thing that surprises me (each year) is how few people Comment and take the chance of posting the link to their daily post, on the official April Blogging from A to Z Challenge #AtoZChallenge daily post – after all – is this not the perfect gathering place at which to check in and start your daily promotion. I start each morning by promoting my post both at the official site and on my Facebook page (which then shows up on Instagram). I’m not sure that they bring in many visits but then the best and most enjoyable method of self-promotion is via visiting and commenting on the blogs of fellow travellers…

Favourite comment: “I think you’ve got the weirdest theme out there for this A to Z. Congrats. This is brilliant. And I’m rolling my eyes at the poem.” by Liz A of lawsofgravity.blogspot.com on Soybeans and a Solage.

Lastly, I like to illustrate my posts copiously, either with photos gleaned from the web or generated by my prompts in Midjourney – so here is a small selection of my favourite Midjourney pictures from this year.

Barley
Milk
Wool

And here it is – the reward for all that effort…