One

Full moon,

Snared in bare limbs

Of cold trees,

Breaks free

On drift

Of mist.

*Th challenge on GBE2 this week was to write something using only words of one syllable.

Time for a Little Laughter

Years ago, I took a poetry class at a local community college. The teacher was a well-known Illinois poet named Kathryn Kerr. During one class she showed us "Another Muse Poem" that she had written in response to a number of poems on that subject, and she challenged us to write about our own muses. This was the result. And I hope this makes up for the poem I posted a couple of weeks ago. : - )

On Reading Kathryn Kerr's "Another Muse Poem"

The Greeks thought of art personified

As nine beautiful and graceful ladies,

Each lovely lady identified

With an aspect of creative activities.

They gave each a melodious appellation

Like Terpsichore, Urania, and Calliope,

And seemed to derive satisfaction

From calling them Muses collectively.

In our day of scientific knowledge

We talk about right-brain phenomena,

And when desiring poetic tutelage,

Run back to the arms of Polyhymnia.

But one lady poet of my acquaintance

Swears her Muse is no lovely Erato--

He's a dirty old man of impatience

Who makes advances at inopportune moments.

I think my Muse most definitely

Can be diagnosed manic-depressively.

He's split my personality effectively,

So I write horror and humor successively.

 And there are some times of near normality

When the idiot just sits on his hiney

Staring cross-eyed in total banality,

Twiddling his lips with his pinky,

Going “Blub—blub—blub.”

The Insatiable Longing of Wanderlust

TRAINS

I was raised on trains

My first two years

And learned to walk

To the sway and bounce

Of the railroad cars,

Chasing my father

From base to base

Across the war.

My childhood home

Was within the sound

Of the Doppler howl

Of diesel trains

Racing across

The lonely prairie

Through eerie night

Of small town '50s.

My present home

Is within the sound

Of the diesel trains

Of another town.

It's strange somehow

That through the storms

Of all these years

That brought us up

From cloth-winged planes

To space ship flights,

A child can still

Lie awake

In the eerie night

And hear the trains.

copyright Angela Parson Myers 2011

March Is a Fickle Mistress

"In like a lion, out like a lamb; in like a lamb, out like a lion" notwithstanding, we Midwesterners never really know what to expect of March. This year has been a prime example. When I left nearly two weeks ago, March was warm enough to make me wonder why I was going. When I returned, snow nestled in the shaded places around hedgerows. And this year isn't so different from past years in that respect. Here's a poem about a childhood experience:

Winter Violets

On a cold and blustery mid-March day
The wind whirled the snow away,
And there, hidden among the leaves,
Grew violets in winter.

copyright 2011

Itty Bitty Poems Pique My Interest

For years I've been writing very short poems I called vignettes for lack of a better word. They didn't fit into the structure of haiku or any of the other accepted short forms of poetry. Most of them were intended just to paint a picture with a few brushstrokes, and I enjoyed them, but nobody else seemed to take them seriously. Then along came Twitter....

Recently I've discovered an entire community of poets who write Twitter poems, some of which are haiku and similar forms, but some of which are hashtagged #micropoetry and seem to fit none of the established forms I know about. I'm not sure if the micropoetry hashtag is an open community, so I haven't used it, but I have tried tweeting a couple of my vignettes. Twitter doesn't have enough characters for titles, but the first one is "Carpe Diem" and the second is "View From My Bedroom Window--Broken Bow, OK."

Purple thumbprint clouds / Like bruises / On the smooth pink flesh / Of sunset....

The moon, somewhere above my sight / Mocks the darkness of the night; / A thousand clouds reflect its light / To turn the earthen road to white.

copyright 2011