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Teacher

November 10, 2023November 10, 2023humanist55

Heart a hater
trace heartache
hear react cheer
he her each
chart care there
art create teach…

Björn Rudberg (brudberg) in Meeting the Bar: Critique and Craft over at dVerse Poets Pub, invites us to write an Anagrammatic Poem,

Select a title of one word containing not more than 3 vowels and 4 consonants.
Try to find as many words that are using only the letter in the title
Combine this into a poem of your own
Do not use any punctuation in the poem

I picked the word Teacher – the artwork is created in Midjourney.

Evolution – Found Poetry 6

November 8, 2023November 16, 2023humanist55

Is Heaven Like This?

Coming down the wrong chimney
found himself on the hearthrug
a room the like of which he
had never seen before
never seen the like…

Rooms ready for the quality
to sit in – the sight very pretty
– room dressed all in white
white curtains
white furniture
white walls
a few lines of pink
carpet all over
gay little flowers

Pictures of ladies and gentlemen
pictures of horses and dogs
two pictures of
a man in long garments
little children and their
mothers round him
the other a man nailed to a cross
why should the lady have
such a sad picture…

© Andrew Wilson, 2023

This is a found poem with words derived from The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley. The title – Evolution, is because Kingsley was a naturalist around the exciting time when the work of Wallage and Darwin were revolutionising the worlds of science, geology and biology and there will be found poems that reference this aspect of the tale. But so far, the finding of poems has been more like the method for refining poems since Kingsley writes very lyrical passages anyway…
The image is derived in Midjourney.
This series was inspired by my friend Misky over at It’s Still Life who has been producing a series of Found Poems…

One Day…

November 8, 2023November 8, 2023humanist55

If I could choose a day
to relive in your company
out of forty years
give or take
when and where would I
set the dials of the time machine
to take us

To the first night we met
in magical massage engaged
diving deep
despite the presence
of strangers
in a one time embassy

To our time in Ireland
walking down to the Atlantic
ten minutes from our cottage door
where fossil “serpents”
writhed across the rocks
and we just stood and breathed it in…

I treasure the winter nights
I slipped sleepless out the front door
wrapped warm
sitting head back
gazing at the myriad stars
threaded through
with man-made satellites
steadily traversing from
the sun-catching to the
dark side of the sky
your warm body waiting
gently protesting my cold one
slipping back in beside you

The first Christmas in this
then new house – scarcely moved in
turning a building project into a home

I think I would settle
and I believe you would be happy too
for the covid deserted coffee bar
by a beach in Crete
playing hookey from the lockdown
though no police ever stopped us…

The ceiling woven from palm-fronds
dappling the light on your face
while the ocean lapped
just yards away on that hot, bright
Cretan winter’s day

Even in winter this café
would normally be thronged
for Sunday lunch serving
fryer-fresh chunky chips
and Greek sausages
with children running round
and people swimming out
over the sandy bottomed bay
the beach frosted with
stones and shells
where the waves kissed the land

But we had the beach and café
To ourselves – brought our own coffee
or was it tea – I don’t remember
but I remember sneaking looks at you
over the top of my book
as we read in companionable silence
as only long-lived love
makes truly possible

I do not need to go there again
it wouldn’t be the same
even if there were chips
because I hold the treasure of that day
safe in my heart
and sometimes I take you there anyway

Lisa (Posted by msjadeli in Poetics) is our host tonight over at dVerse Poets Pub where she invites us to use a time machine to fulfil something on our fantasy time travel bucket list…

Evolution – Found Poetry 5

November 3, 2023November 16, 2023humanist55

A Stately Home

Grand lodges they
stone gate posts
on top, a dreadful bogey
all teeth, horns, tail
enemies run for their lives
at first sight of them

The house, a real live house
grown as the world grew
only an upstart fellow would
change it for some spick-and-span
new Gothic or Elizabethan thing

Large crooked chimneys
altered again and again
till they ran one into another
Tom fairly lost his way
in pitchy darkness

Evolution – Found Poetry 4

October 31, 2023October 31, 2023humanist55

Waters…

The sea rolled and roared
over rocks in Winter nights
lay still in bright Summer days
for children to bathe and play in

A spring- not as you see here
which soaks up out of white gravel
in the bog among red fly-catchers
pink bottle-heath and white-orchis

But a real North-country limestone
fountain where heathen fancied
nymphs sat cooling themselves
the hot Summer’s days – shepherds
peeped at them from behind the bushes…

Poetry Postcard Fest Follow Up Post 25 – The End…

October 30, 2023October 30, 2023humanist55

This is the very last card I sent, to Elise, and hers was the very first card I received which is as it should be – I have enjoyed the whole experience and I hope you all enjoyed my sharing the cards I sent to Group 15. Finally, I have taken a group photo of all the cards I received in order – until next year…

Dear Elise

You were my first
and you are my last
to write a poem
to a stranger, that is
I saved this pearly treasure
for you who talked of
the remnants of human history
and these shells on a Cretan beach
unposed I assure you
also tell of lives past
moist forms departed.
So much easier to write
to a stranger when you
have received their’s first
and it has been fun and
I regret I have reached the end.

Poetry Postcard Fest Follow Up Post 24

October 29, 2023October 29, 2023humanist55

The Poetry Postcard Fest is a challenge which encourages poets to write an unedited poem on a postcard and send it to a stranger. Organised by the Cascadia Poetics Lab, who organise the participants into lists of 31 + yourself for you to address your offerings to. This was my first year and hearing about it just in time to register, I was on List 15. The lists are sent out in early July and you have until the end of August to send out your missives – to date I have received 23 of 31 possibles and now that we are into September, it is allowable to share the cards and poems you sent and the cards but not the poems you received. I will share these in the order of sending and I will miss out those which I have not yet received in case they arrive soon…
Although the original poem is to be sent as written – crossings out, blots and all, I have typed them out for people who can’t read my writing and I am allowing myself to edit if I feel like it…
Before I post the last poem I sent but whose sender was the first I received – the next eight cards, two at a time, are ones on the list that I sent but didn’t receive from, – given what happened to the 23rd to arrive by way of Trinidad – I have not given up hope – so if you recognise a card you received and you know you sent one – please let me know in the comments and we shall presume it travelling still, the backwaters of the postal system…

Dear Julie

I see you live in the watery
maze that is Seattle
more water than land
but perhaps you have a beach
where flotsam and jetsam collect
like this one in Crete where
we lived in lockdown.
I thought of the things
that wash up on beaches
and added my thoughts
a refugee child from the small boats
a famous shipwreck in a Xanthos cove
a Russian tank destroyed in Ukraine
and a gas-masked Barbie
abandoned in Chernobyl
not all beaches
but flotsam nevertheless

Dear Emily

What gives a location
a sense of place that
makes it unique to it’s population?
I studied geography long ago
and still I love to read maps
and Gadsden is on a river
though that doesn’t guarantee
that your sense of place
is the one I imagine
or even that of your neighbours.
Perhaps the River Coosa
is everything to you
or is it a street or the climate
that makes, for you,
Gadsden’s sense of place?

Evolution – Found Poetry 3

October 27, 2023October 27, 2023humanist55

A poor Irishwoman
grey shawl over her head
crimson madder petticoat
be sure she came from Galway
limped along tired and footsore
a very tall, handsome woman

Walked beside Tom
asked where he lived
he never met such a
pleasant spoken woman
Asked whether he said his prayers
sad when told he knew no prayers to say

Poetry Postcard Fest Follow Up Post 23

October 27, 2023October 27, 2023humanist55

Dear Jesse

Forgive me for sending
coals to Newcastle for
Seattle must have many
tiny moss gardens
nestled in the crook of branches
but though we are strangers
and I have only your address to go on
as one poet to another
I hope you too see
moss gardens growing in the trees
on rock
by streams
wherever you look
and I would like to share
this garden of mine…

Harrison sounds like a surname
Andina a forename
but must I trust the form
as you filled it in?
So little to go on
in reaching out with a poem
to a stranger who may
yet turn out to be a friend
stranger things have happened.
I read about Seattle in “Stay”
by Nicola Griffiths and I
try to picture you living
across the watery way
and unknowing you
I send this picture of Friendship
Bracelets given by my partner
It’d some kind of message…

Between the Bullets and the Bombs…

October 25, 2023October 25, 2023humanist55

A detective contemplates a corpse
stabbed so many times that
he concludes – this was personal
so I am called an evil terrorist
as if the zombies in a
first person shoot-’em up
were suddenly weighted to win
I don’t want to witness my crime
by seeing the enemy as people
so I remember my X-box
shooting down Nazis
whose Holocaust
ironically
helped justify
our Palestinian “displacement”
between the bullets and the bombs

I press the button
which drops the bomb
but I don’t see the blast blossom
the seven stories pancake down
all in my rearview mirror
I don’t even see the confirmation
back at base – nothing to learn
about smart bombs
and our TV does not show
the dead children
or traumatised living
amongst the rubble
an angel of death
my hands are clean
only the world seeing
the blood dripping from them
between the bullets and the bombs

I am an old woman
whose heart has just given out
on the refugee road to elsewhere
surrounded, shelled
we took the only road they left open
my children will go to Kuwait
via camps in Lebanon
where they will be displaced
again by Saddam Hussain
and die in England
they will call this The Disaster
but my great-grandchildren
will have a good life
far from the bullets and the bombs

I am an old woman from Poland
I escaped the Holocaust
of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals
and the less-than-perfect of mind or body
only to find myself taken
to another prison camp
where the Jews are outside the wire
my husband and I helped the inmates
driving them to hospital
and I learned their language
so they have scheduled me for early release
and I will not die
between the bullets and the bombs

I am a baby who died
as the grossest provocation
the loudest shout-out
to a world that has long since
stopped listening and covered its eyes
whilst I am a baby crushed
into my mother’s breast
my grave a concrete sandwich
but we two babies
separated by bullets and bombs
whose ancestors lived here
side by side in peace
for millennia
if tested genetically
cannot be told apart
brothers and sisters under the skin…

Written for Poetics: Why war? over at dVerse Poets Pub Posted by paeansunplugged