June, 2024 - How would you know...

You Will Leave a Lacuna…

June 14, 2024June 15, 2024humanist55

…And while thy willing soul transpires

Willing! You think me willing?
And that my soul transpires…
T’were nearer the mark to assert
my body glows with rage

At every pore with instant fires,

Blushes at first
when I your base desires
didst early espy but soon
‘twas anger coloured my face

Now let us sport us while we may

Sport you say
with you the hunter
and no doubt I the prey
but you have made me furious

And now, like amorous birds of prey,

I refer you to my previous stanza
furious not amorous
– we or I at least – are not animals
forever chasing food or mating

Rather at once our time devour

You see you even now confuse
the act of mating
with that of eating
but I will not join you at your table

Than languish in his slow-chapped power.

An age at least
would be too long
to tarry in your lascivious presence
in fact I will not waste another hour

Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,

My strength will henceforth
be employed in resisting
your siren call
and enjoying sweet silence
when you are gone

And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life

Oh snake I see you now
taking my maidenhood
with rough strife
no thought to later
make me your wife…

Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run…

Enough! Begone you tiresome poet
you can’t try your wiles on a Yorkshire girl,
a girl from Hull – and you should know it
and yet…
when you are gone…
you will leave a lacuna…

© Andrew Wilson, 2024

We studied the poet Andrew Marvell at school and I suspect that more than one of us callow youths committed the poem “To His Coy Mistress” to heart in case these lines of seduction might someday prove useful in our own future seduction attempts…
Having just watched Bridgerton, Season 3, I was perhaps channelling the feisty women challenging the rather weaker men in reframing this response to lines from the poem.

Written for Laura Bloomsbury in Meeting the Bar: Critique and Craft over at dVerse Poets Pub, who tonight challenges us to elaborate on a fragment of up to 13 lines from another poem – to “Elaborate Lacunae in the Fragment or Keeping Things Whole“

Ten Second Theatre

June 12, 2024June 12, 2024humanist55

Driving up the hill
through the village
a ten second drama
plays out to my right
– a baby boy
comfortable in the crook
of his grandmother’s arm
receives a hurried kiss
from his mother
as she turns to walk down
the hill to the bus stop
the baby stretches out his arm
towards his departing mother
once more going to work
more bewildered than upset
but his grandmother
steps back indoors
before possible tears
leaving the pavement empty…

Over at the dVerse Poets Pub, dorahak is hosting Poetics and invites us to write about Liminal spaces using one of the following senses of the phrase.

In general, a liminal space can be looked at in three ways:

1) as an empty structural space (an overgrown, ruined fairground, shuttered department store once familiar like K-Marts here in the U.S., an abandoned shopping center or mall, a silent nighttime hotel corridor); OR

2) as a place of transit (a hotel lobby, an airport terminal, or a parking garage, gas/petrol station or a city street at night); OR

3) a passage in a more abstract sense, e.g., New Year’s Eve, a decade’s close, a birthday, anniversary, or holi(holy)day.

Let there be light…

June 6, 2024June 6, 2024humanist55

People talk about writer’s block
– about being over-faced
by the blank page
but to sit down with a blank page
and pick up your pen is to
dive into the liminal space
through the portal of the page
breaking the smooth surface
making a splash
wearing the threads
of previous thoughts
oft rehearsed but still
essentially, feeling naked

We swam in the waters of
Mahon harbour on a night when
the little side bay was filled
with phosphorescence
took a hand full of water and
slowly released it back into the main
and in our hands
and in the falling water
individual creatures gave forth a
tiny burst of light.
but swimming through their midst
the lights coalesced
into a ghostly glow around our bodies
all semblance of individual
creatures, words or events
subsumed into the glow

Later rowing our cockleshell boat
we traced our path with
pools of light left in our wake
where the oars had dipped in
and disturbed the
creatures distributed
in the depth beneath
motion was transformed into light
pale radium green, glowing
under the Mediterranean sky
– and to think
these motions are
always present
the glow – the pools of
light even when we can’t
see them – blinded by
the greater light of day.

The light of luminescence lives
in my mind as a memory
fixed by processes
still unfathomable to
the very minds that
try to comprehend
– axons and nuclei
and who knows what
– as ungraspable as those tiny
light-emitting creatures
like words on a page they
appear unpredictably
have their moment
and disappear into
the stream of time
into the past
as we authors swim
across the portal
climb out on the
other side of the pool
and only then
turn and look at
the patches of
light we have left in our wake
astounded at the
words filling the blank page…

Tonight is Open Link Night over at dVerse Poets Pub and msjadeli is our hostess. I wrote this in my AWA writing group a few weeks ago and it seems to follow on from my post before last – contemplating the process of poesie…

Lovers’ Eyes

June 5, 2024June 5, 2024humanist55

She feels the eyes
of women who’ve loved her
adorning each part of her…

Tonight, our host over at dVerse Poets Pub is lillian in Poetics who, feeling nostalgic on the occasion of her 8th anniversary hosting at the bar, has resurrected for the third time, an ekphrastic prompt provided by the artist Catrin Welz-Stein. Catrin has enjoyed providing the inspiration for the pub-goers twice before and enjoys the interaction. I picked one of the four pictures which Catrin kindly allowed us to use…

Reading Aloud…

June 4, 2024June 4, 2024humanist55

I like to read out loud
to turn tiny marks
regimented on the page
from text to sound
filtered through eyes that read
brain to comprehend
a mouth that shapes my voice.
Poetry or prose the
writer laid words down
wrapped round meanings
all their own but
which we readers too
may catch and breathe
out into space between
mouth and ear
reader and listener.
Even reading aloud alone
brings out meaning, makes it clear
and once peeled from the page
I sit and let the words hang there…

How would you know…

Month: June 2024