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A Poem a Day first week
Apr. 7th, 2019 07:53 amPrompt two: Inertia?
If no poem comes is
there a place it didn't
come from and can
I go there? Please?
Day Two
Cast Iron
My brother's wife was taking his cast iron pots to the donation bin.
Everyone in my family was taught that you had to have cast iron pots and
you had to keep them forever
god forbid, some disaster ended you
and they were lost until a bunch of
archeologists could dig them up.
Even still they'd be good,
just needing bit of scrubbing and seasoning.
No one outside our family
can understand this
need to hang on
to something so
impossibly
heavy.
or why we tell a history hidden behind a patina of alteration
So we conspire.
I tell him I will go to Value Village
and buy them all back
—give them to her for Christmas—
adding another chapter in the mythology of our persistence and our resilience.
Laughing, because that’s what we do.
Day Three
When I was small, I thought
“pass me the honey honey”
or the “sugar sugar”
was how you asked,
so I didn’t know why everyone laughed
my first time away from my family.
Even now, in my head
there is the honey honey and
the sugar sugar
but I don’t say them aloud.
Day Five
I wrote a poem today!
I didn’t even let it rise in some warm and safe place in my brain
I just coughed it out
Or drank it down
Or shook it free
Or, or, or…geez.
maybe it wasn't very good but it felt really good.
Day Five
Winter, the air was as dry as unbuttered toast.
Ice formed from any moisture and hung onto any thread.
Children were bundled so if they fell
it would be face up
so they wouldn’t suffocate,
their identities unknowable behind scarves and hats pulled low.
Until a Chinook
when they threw off their stiff winter clothes
and ran in their socks and shirt sleeves
in yards of mud,
no, not ran, but hopped
like new little toads with tails abandoned,
this way and that,
with the randomness of joy.
And when it was over
they came home dressed in other children’s winter clothes.
Day Six
Not Haiku
Sometimes when I'm riding my bike
a fully formed haiku will pop into my head.
I swerve and then recover knowing
that
by the time I get home it will be gone,
drifted off on the wind
to seed the mind of some poet
who is more righteous and unencumbered
by things like
gravity, velocity and time.
And often while I put away the groceries
I find there was a coupon*
I forgot to use too.
fuck
Day Seven
Quilts become stories
independent of empires.
With heads bowed
women
stitched hopes and secrets that survived in the fibers,
There was no permanence for those who by law
owned
not even what was thrown away
so
they threaded their lives into this craft.
they borrowed from every garments incarnation each cherished scrap
threading a different history, a history that included them;
Undaunted by limitations
and buoyed by the joy of expression.
Empires will always fall and all art becomes fatuous
but quilts become stories.
If no poem comes is
there a place it didn't
come from and can
I go there? Please?
Day Two
Cast Iron
My brother's wife was taking his cast iron pots to the donation bin.
Everyone in my family was taught that you had to have cast iron pots and
you had to keep them forever
god forbid, some disaster ended you
and they were lost until a bunch of
archeologists could dig them up.
Even still they'd be good,
just needing bit of scrubbing and seasoning.
No one outside our family
can understand this
need to hang on
to something so
impossibly
heavy.
or why we tell a history hidden behind a patina of alteration
So we conspire.
I tell him I will go to Value Village
and buy them all back
—give them to her for Christmas—
adding another chapter in the mythology of our persistence and our resilience.
Laughing, because that’s what we do.
Day Three
When I was small, I thought
“pass me the honey honey”
or the “sugar sugar”
was how you asked,
so I didn’t know why everyone laughed
my first time away from my family.
Even now, in my head
there is the honey honey and
the sugar sugar
but I don’t say them aloud.
Day Five
I wrote a poem today!
I didn’t even let it rise in some warm and safe place in my brain
I just coughed it out
Or drank it down
Or shook it free
Or, or, or…geez.
maybe it wasn't very good but it felt really good.
Day Five
Winter, the air was as dry as unbuttered toast.
Ice formed from any moisture and hung onto any thread.
Children were bundled so if they fell
it would be face up
so they wouldn’t suffocate,
their identities unknowable behind scarves and hats pulled low.
Until a Chinook
when they threw off their stiff winter clothes
and ran in their socks and shirt sleeves
in yards of mud,
no, not ran, but hopped
like new little toads with tails abandoned,
this way and that,
with the randomness of joy.
And when it was over
they came home dressed in other children’s winter clothes.
Day Six
Not Haiku
Sometimes when I'm riding my bike
a fully formed haiku will pop into my head.
I swerve and then recover knowing
that
by the time I get home it will be gone,
drifted off on the wind
to seed the mind of some poet
who is more righteous and unencumbered
by things like
gravity, velocity and time.
And often while I put away the groceries
I find there was a coupon*
I forgot to use too.
fuck
Day Seven
Quilts become stories
independent of empires.
With heads bowed
women
stitched hopes and secrets that survived in the fibers,
There was no permanence for those who by law
owned
not even what was thrown away
so
they threaded their lives into this craft.
they borrowed from every garments incarnation each cherished scrap
threading a different history, a history that included them;
Undaunted by limitations
and buoyed by the joy of expression.
Empires will always fall and all art becomes fatuous
but quilts become stories.
