Archive | Words

I Love Words

Some words sing – like wing.
Some words thunder – like blunder
or plunder
or softly creep – like sleep.

Some words are harsh
and croak like frogs in the marsh.

There are homely words
like box and barrel;
and is there an uglier word than snarl?

The word thump sounds like a bump.
Then there is March, stiff as starch.

Words can murmur or can shout.
Words can shake my thoughts about –
words of comfort and of grace
or words that put me in my place !

I love friends and flowers and birds.
I must add, I do love words!

– Marion Wyllie

On Hearing Things Male

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth …. A wind from God swept over the face of the waters ….Then God said, Let there be light; and there was light. Genesis 1:1-3

Did the author of Genesis hear Yahweh’s voice
like the rumble of thunder over Mount Zion?
And did the man say to himself, as though spitting
against the wind, this boom must be male?
Male ears hear things male. Even medieval giants
decreed, Whatever is received, is received
according to the mode of the receiver. And if
Yahweh drops her hairbrush in the desert,
who can hear it? And write it in the book?

– Kilian McDonnell

Iowa

What a strange happiness.
Sixty poets have gone off drunken, weeping into the hills,
I among them.
There is no one of us who is not a fool.
What is to be found there?
What is the point in this?
Someone scrawls six lines and says them.
What a strange happiness.

– Robert Sward

Sex after 70

I sit across
from my publisher
who cuddles his coffee
and explodes with “What!”
“I’m writing a book on haiku,”
I repeat calmly.
“On haiku!” his face ared.
“Why can’t you write
something people want to read
like ‘fishing on the west coast?’
“Or sex after 70,” I counter.
“Yes, sex after 70,”
his eyes switch from
exasperated to hopeful,
“Now there’s a promising title!”
We both fall silent.
I imagine he is weighing up
the odds of me being informed
on the subject, while I
do a quick survey of
a possible table of contents.
Sex and osteoarthritis –
the joints locking
in positions unheard of
in the kama-sutra.
Choices – orgasm or muscle cramp;
whether to allow myself
the pleasure of orgasm
or go into the pain
of a concurrent foot cramp.
Whether to focus on the vagina
and the blissful dissolving
or the foot and get that spasm
dealt with and those
toes straightened out.
Decisions, decisions and
before I know it I am
thinking of nouns . . .
those nouns of haiku
and how each noun
condenses a universe
and packs a wallop
and how two, or three nouns
together, if carefully chosen,
can tumble you into the void
and to Universes beyond,
and how the pause, the pause
at the 5th or 12th syllable
opens so many possibilities
to dwarf all orgasms or cramps
come to that, and transforms
dark crows on bare branches
into cockatoos on plum blossom.
“I’m writing the book on haiku,”
I firmly address my publisher
across the steam of his coffee.
He sighs, takes a sip and asks,
“When’s the first draft ready?”

– Naomi Beth Wakan

I am the poet of my courtyard

the minute hand hurries
to catch slow passing hours
we tick together
search for words
until dusk descends
and night chinks white
across the icy courtyard

ice flowers whirl
fireplaces breathe
sculpted trees stand
strong and stark
new born leaves hidden
inside furrowed bark

I read poetry
and for a short time
live inside a stranger’s world

rage at winter’s vitality
as a stiff wind blows
salty curtains of snow

– Rita Katz

Windblown

Borne on the wind
borne on the wind
My words over the years
words of help
guidance
truth
whirling around the ether
ignored
unwanted

I imagine them falling
smacking to the ground
lying there, a jumble of abc’s
Being picked up, wondered at
then hurled skywards again
to start a new journey
While my voice gets weaker and weaker
From the effort of it all

– Dorothy Surtees Goodman

Late Bloomer

I used to say it’s never too late to be a late bloomer.
But now I’m not sure –

Now, as the words I reach for
run away and scurry under the furniture
like dust bunnies.

All fuzzy and unrecognizable.

Behind the couch a conundrum of nouns huddle together
trying to make sense of themselves.
Echinacea, Chet Baker, colander –

Whatever are they up to?

Ramekin, catkin, rhomboid, rheumatoid
And that guy who did Art Nouveau wallpaper and was
a Bourne-Jones buddy. The something or other
Brotherhood.

A perfectly sensible conversation lurches to a halt –
right in mid-sentence,
clobbered by the blank page in the dictionary
of my mind.

Somewhere there’s a parallel universe
where even an elderly poet
can frolic through a limbic thesaurus
reach out for a word and capture
just that perfect one that ran away today.

William Morris, that’s his name.
The wallpaper guy, Pre-Raphaelite.

– Laurie Lewis

Soliloquy

Westward the course of empire takes its way;
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown;
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day;
I hate to see that evenin’ sun go down.

Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest
When that Aprille with his shoures soot
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest
Of Man’s first disobedience and the forbidden fruit

Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn.
Abandon hope, all ye who enter here
The undiscovered country from whose bourne
Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer.

Lo, the poor Indian! Whose untutored mind,
A thing of beauty is, a joy forever.
I must be cruel only to be kind;
Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever.

Sweet are the uses of adversity;
As dreams are made on, we are such stuff.
Neither a borrower nor a lender be,
And damned be him that first cries, “Hold, enough!”

– Ted Melnechuk

Report from the Front

All over newspapers have stopped appearing,
and combatants everywhere are returning home.
No one knows what is happening.
The generals are on long distance with the President,
Surveying the planet from on high.
No one knows even who has died, or how,
or who won last night, anything.
Those in attendance on them may,
for all we know, still be there.

All over newspapers have stopped appearing.
Words once more, more than ever,
have begun to matter. And people are writing
poetry. Opposing regiments, declares a friend,
are refusing evacuation, are engaged instead
in sonnet sequences; though they understand, he says,
the futility of iambics in the modem world.
That they are concerned with the history and meaning
of prosody. That they persist in their exercises
with great humility and reverence.

– Robert Sward

The Word Choreographer

I yearn to be
a choreographer of words
that whirl and twirl like dervishes
across the page,
with dazzling elegance and power,
forming duets and trios, quartets and more.
Magic words that sparkle,
inspiring, inviting, exploring, imploring;
Crisp consonants and vivacious vowels;
Ordinary words transformed,
and plunged into sentences.
My pen is poised,
awaiting sensuous semantics
and wordy turbulence
to explode
from my writer’s brain.
I wait for the fire
to ignite
a conflagration
of eloquence
and passion.
Instead,
a spark,
a sudden blaze flares up,
then quickly dies.
Undampened,
I await
tomorrow’s hope.

– lone Grover

A Letter to Old Poets

(Inspired by Rilke’s Letter to a Young Poet)

You are never too old to write poems
even if you never wrote them before

within you is a lifetime of feelings
begging to be in notebooks or published

share the long journey you have made
reveal all your hidden secrets and lusts

As elder, you can get away with anything
write outrageously, courageously and often

what can they do to you at your age
if you speak truth to power in poems

or mock the sacred and silly which now
makes no sense to you or just amuses

in these years of your earned wisdom
write your learning, fantasies, hopes

recall beauty that made you gasp
or ugliness that made you groan

give yourself permission to write
imperfectly for yourself or others

please put down on paper what you can tear up
or give those who need to hear the old poets

– Ruth Harriet Jacobs

Forgery

No more ink,
nothing wet.
Just fine black powder
sprayed on paper and bonded in a flash
of electrostatic forgery.
Letters, words, sentences appear
faster than meteors
fizzing and sputtering through the atmosphere.
Quills, lead, even rolling balls –
things of the past.
Poems and stories conjured today
by Maxwell’s demons and Schrödinger’s cats.

Imagine Hamlet emerging
on a Hewlett-Packard laser jet.
Never mind a million monkeys
typing for a million years.
Now it’s countless motes of black dust
shooting through space,
falling willy-nilly on the white surface,
cast into shapes and forms
that say, “To be or not to be.”
Well is it?
Is dust destined to speak,
to replace ink and even thought?

– Roger S Jones

An Ode to Rhyme

There was a time when poetry
Fair sang with grace and symmetry.
Doomed lovers swooned, ab, ab,
And soldiers died quite rhythmically.
When ribald tales rolled off the tongue,
And epigrams with candor sung,
The rhyme was crucial to the tale,
In sonnet, ode, or villanelle.

So by your leave, and with your grace,
With strength of purpose, straight of face,
With reverence for iambic feet,
And just a trace of tongue in cheek –
With meter, stress, and anapest,
We’ll try to lay free verse to rest.
A mite contrived?  A trifle trite?
What matters – is the meter right?

– Myra Woods

Free verse

Free verse is not always free
It’s worth about two cents to me
For poetry that does not rhyme
Is like a clock that won’t keep running

– Blaine Arthur Way

To a Cabbage

My Muse, in vain, has often toiled
To write an ode to cabbage boiled,
And likewise strained to weave a ballad
In fitting praise of cabbage salad.
In pretty phrases I would flout
The merits of hot sauerkraut
And even coleslaw seems to me
To lend itself to poetry.
But when, with inspiration toiling,
I sniff some lovely cabbage boiling,
And tenderly inhale the vapour,
Pedantic phrases fill the paper.
And though I know it is my duty
To elevate with simple beauty,
I feel a deep desire burning
To fill the page with words of learning.
For simple words do not belong
To anything that smells so strong.

– John Sullivan

My Love Affair with Libraries

As an abused child
I escaped to a library
from a discordant home
full of screaming, anger
loved library peace
read and dreamed there

I who had few possessions
possessed for two weeks
transcending books.
The children’s librarian
made me feel important
loved in that library

As an adolescent
in a bad city high school
I got my real education
in the public library.
Librarians were my teachers
finding me books
libraries a sanctuary still

As a young reporter
I found in libraries
background for assignments
a quiet place to write.
Libraries made me a writer

As a young mother
I shared the library
with my children.
Now as a gerontologist
I love to see elders
in reading rooms and
at library events
finding refuge, stimulation
companionship, information

Now I speak at libraries
my books are in libraries.
I give a little to libraries
in gratitude

– Ruth Harriet Jacobs

My First Hearing Aid

Must you mumble, garble
consonants, rush to the end,

drop last syllables?
Must I teach phonetics again?

Speak with precision. Like
Professor Henry Higgins,

I’m a reasonable sort of man,
bearing malice toward none,

if only diphthongs were purer,
vowels and lives did not decay.

– Kilian McDonnell

It Will Come to Me

the word is there
i know it well
i will sound rusty chords
place my tongue just so
move my lips in aged patterns

the word is there
part of a thought
waiting for the word
to make it whole
it will do my bidding
in its own time

lost in the labyrinth
of a convoluted brain
it sits inert
in a cul-de-sac
a rock settled
deep in place
stubborn   unyielding

it is not my first word
formed in an unmapped mind
it is one of many
saved from a lifetime
listening
sounding
singing
the melody of language

the word sits poised to move
this word will tell you
what I need you to know

it is my word
i will speak it to you
wait with me until it comes

– Dorthi Dunsmore

They Say, I Say

they say
cut to the chase
shorten your stories

I say I’m trying to
share an experience
why must I boil it down
to its essence
deglaze it
evaporate it
to an extract
what will we talk about
in the spaces
around the words
you say I should leave out

please
relax
listen
slide into reverie
linger with me

– Joyce Harries