Poetry Postcard Fest Follow Up Post 2024 #2

Dear Colette
Amidst the city reduced to heaps of rubble
revenge for one innocent peoples’
centuries of persecution and trouble
now enacted and exacted on another
a child learns resilience from new life
and wonder turns to hope…


I’m sorry this is such a heavy subject to start the season with but sadly it is the world we live in. I appreciated all your comments on my posts last year and was delighted to find you on my list, Colette – Lots of Love, Andrew

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 second year and I was on List 10. 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 16 of 31 possibles and now that we are into September, it is allowable to share the cards and poems you sent.
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…

Tableau of the Fallen

From my writing seat
the window frames the
tableau of yellow leaves
the wisteria
has met with Autumn
too early this year

Did I not water
one crucial day when
wind plucked the water
as surely as sun
drying out the leaves
killing them too soon

Today that same wind
plucks them from the vine
to lie in yellow
drifts upon the ground
the devastation
plucks at my heart too

Do those leaves accuse
me for lack of care
plants grown in a pot
need more vigilance
did I then fail them
like Gaza’s children

Plucked from life too soon
all because Zion
“is mowing the grass”
arms makers making
money from the war
leaders not leading

Have we the people
seeing the tableau
of all the fallen
done enough for those
unlucky to be born
trapped in a pot

They did not choose to
be born in a land
others had decided
they could not share with
had to have it all
to be safe from death

Children of Gaza
lie countless as my
wisteria leaves
accusing me of
not raising my voice
sufficiently yet…

© Andrew Wilson, 2024
Previous poems of protest and images generated in Midjourney…

https://how-would-you-know.com/2024/03/six-questions-from-pablo-neruda.html
https://how-would-you-know.com/2024/08/breaking-news-and-hearts.html

Over at dVerse Poets Pub,  Laura Bloomsbury in Meeting the Bar: Critique and Craft, marks the birthday of American poet Sam Hamill (1943-2018) of whom she says “Hamill’s poetry is absent on rhyme and heavy on unadulterated lyricism. He talks his poetry to the page as here in “After Morning Rain” which switches between his personal loci and wider, world issues […] Hamill was a poet both in the world and of the world, being the leading light for ‘Poets Against the War’ and still his poetry does not stray far from what he sees, feels and knows directly”.

Laura also asks us to write in the poetry form ‘The Tableau’ created by Emily Romano in 2008:

Poetry Style:

  • 1 or more verses
  • 6 lines per verse
  • 5 beats/syllables per line

Poetry Rules:

no rhyme scheme
title should contain the word ‘tableau’
poem should aim to be pictorial

Breaking News and Hearts…

Breaking news and hearts
he’d waited all his life to see the Northern Lights
and when they finally shimmered – he slept through it

Breaking news and hearts
he was her Pole Star
and without him she lost all direction

Breaking news and hearts
the last Polar bear had
no Arctic ice to hunt upon

Breaking news and hearts
she broke the mirror her grandmother
smuggled beyond the reach of the Holocaust

Breaking news and hearts
the baby drove the boy away
and not surely into her arms

Breaking news and hearts
a premmie did not heroically make it
as the movies teach us to expect

Breaking news and hearts
the dead in Gaza top forty thousand
and Zion still hasn’t had its pound of flesh

Breaking news and hearts
another little babe is born
somewhere under the stars…

© Andrew Wilson, 2024

Created in Midjourney

Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Melissa Lemay in Uncategorized invites us to write Zeugmatically. The word zeugma is defined by Merriam-Webster as “a figure of speech in which a word applies to two others in different senses”.