I remember a time when Someone like I Would never consider Myself being worth anything, let alone everything Funny how life can change a thing like that As my self-worth, my self-care and love of self grows
National Poetry Month for 2021 Day 30
First time ever completing thirty whole days of original poetry – YAY!🎊
I end National Poetry Month, keeping it short and simple, with my first Golden Shovel poem using the opening line of Sonnet 15 by William Shakespeare
The Golden Shovel form was created by Terrance Hayes in tribute to Gwendolyn Brooks. The rules are simple:
Take a line (or lines) from a poem you admire.
Use each word in the line (or lines) as the end word for each line in your poem.
If you take a single line with six words, your poem would be six lines long. If you take two lines and the first line has 19 words, and the next has 13 words your poem would be 32 lines long in total and so on…
Keep the end words in order of the original poem.
The new poem does not have to be about the same subject as the poem that offers the end words.
Give credit to the poet who originally wrote the line (or lines).
For the past near sixty-one days, I have blogged every single day. Last month for Two Writing Teachers Slice of Life Writing challenge was arduous enough. That self-promise of thirty-one days straight of blogging, especially when I had posted barely a couple dozen times from all of May 2020 to March of 2021, was truly diving off the deep end to see if I can swim. [I actually did that dived into a 16 foot deep pool without knowing how to swim.] No, I still cannot swim – don’t ask. Luckily I was much better at following through on immersing myself into regularly blogging again.
Because it is following right behind the March challenge, April is its own war as it is all about poetry. Each year for National Poetry Month I look around and enjoy the work of other poets. Each day I also post original work of my own, honoring National Poetry Writing Month. At least I’ve tried to. I admit I in previous years I have been a spotty poster during April at best. If a dozen new works happen it was a good year. C’est la vie.
As I had naught else to do, I also challenged my self to try more of a poetry form I was not fond of the Villanelle. I absolutely knew I could not do thirty days of them, but I have managed one new one per week, the most recent as of today which I published this morning. Which means I now have five villanelles in my poetry portfolio. Having written four more it is better than the single one that has existed for nearly decade by itself, so that is a huge win in my book.
2021 is the only year in which I have participated in National Poetry Writing Month where not only have I not bailed halfway through the month from writing exhaustion. Granted some were posted late, like yesterday’s coming in at nearly 11:30pm, but I will have thirty new poems under my belt, including four new villanelles! With the finish line a mere three days from now, I am confident I will complete it. I cannot begin to tell you how proud I am of myself for this!
Slice of Life – Tuesday Writing Challenge – Two Writing Teachers
The spark that once set my soul alight with fire and fight I thought died in the embers of the long ago killed slow But a moment of the then returns to the now and how The desire for apathy crawls upon my skin and sinks within But I turn in tune, a marionette who can’t forget When words of honor marked needs negated by dishonorable deeds I am conjured by promises left unspoken and now broken In the end whose price is the one direly paid for thoughts mislaid? For once the Fates in their own twisted sense divine it shall not be mine And eventually, the pain subsides and the soul heals from wounds surreal Finally shelved to deal only with today’s realities I welcome the banalities
I did not know that time could be heartless In its impatient flight… how sad it is I never knew the worth of you until You slipped away one day on quiet winds Myrna / “On Quiet Winds”
How quickly love can fill an empty space Your presence oh so loud within my heart If I became unglued, your love the paste We’d have forever, if time played its part Even with life’s curved balls that we would face I worried not in those times of harshness As moth to light you’ve always come to me And for you here I’ve been and thus would be In trust I closed my eyes to the starkness I did not know that time could be heartless
We who are young think not of life’s avail That Clotho’s thread will never come to end Treating life as an ever crawling snail The next adventure’s just around the bend Day, week, month, year, how quickly it can sail We don’t hurry, ignorant in our bliss Thinking “I’m running as fast as I can” But Father Time will merely shrug and scan The sands that flow in that great glass of his In its impatient flight… how sad it is
The only one of them that truly knew Lachesis crossed two most unlikely strings And begged unto us love, so deep and true Despite our worst, to steer us clear of things That did drive many who we’ve known in two And love we did have, love beyond our fill You did not believe in blessings and such Not channeled by remote, I guessed as much I knew we were blessed, but even still I never knew the worth of you until
I felt that first graze of empty down deep My face became a moon to absent suns At brink of the final task left to keep And knowing the effects once she is done I think even Atropos dared to weep Equal to lives saintly or ones that sinned She cannot cater to the whom or what Within her hands the strings of life are cut Now silence reigns in my heart where you dinned You slipped away one day on quiet winds
National Poetry Month for 2021 Day 15
A return to one of my favorites the Glosa (classic).
Bored ambivalence was the word of the day Decided I was going to go home the long way It’s only curiosity, was the cool wind blowing around me Seemed like a day just like any other one But then a curve ball was thrown into the mix hon
There she was the new big city kid now in a small country town Sitting on the fence by the creek, so all alone and looking down Didn’t take a psychic trick, to see she was homesick I had passed by, but Fate triumphed and I came back after a while And the reward I reaped was to see beauty in the light of her smile
Every day she smiles it’s just pure elation Every hour she laughs I can’t help but laugh too Every minute we kiss it’s an inspiration And every second she breathes — I thank the heavens it’s true
I tried to descend from the fence, but my foot wasn’t quit clear And yeah, she laughed as I fell in the water dead on my rear But she was quick to quell, any hurt feelings and that was swell By the time I walked her home as first stars shone bright I was dry and she knew everything was going to be all right
We became friends who flitted twixt that love or the other Took two years to learn that we were only meant for each other The great gift I was to find was to let me live inside her mind What wisdom knew back then, that one act of kindness from me, Would ascend to a love for you that’s here for all eternity?
Fate stays unconquered every time on the when and where, We only knew we had arrived once we got there
Every day you smile it’s just pure elation Every hour you laugh I can’t help but laugh too Every minute we kiss it’s an inspiration And every second you breathe — I thank the heavens for you
The tritina is a reduced version of the sestina written in iambic pentameter, which uses 3 repeated end-words (i.e. the final word of each line is repeated as the final word of each line in subsequent stanzas, just in a different order) and 3 three-line stanzas with a concluding one-line coda that must contain all three repeated words in order of their original appearance. The pattern/order of the repeated end-words is:
I wake up to a nice quiet morning. Well “quiet” is relative given I live in New York City and it’s a weekday morning, but you know what I mean. I say quiet because in the past couple of years there are three multi-unit dwellings are in some process of construction within a block’s radius of my building. A three blocks away, people have begun to move into a new building that must house at least 50 apartments units. Another mixed-use construct rises across the street from it promising even more housing units, plus ground floor commercial space from the size of it.
Because Covid delayed much of for months, once they were allowed back it was with a vengeance. The usual 7am – 3pm became 5pm and later depending on where they are in the process. While clearly loud it was never so egregious to disturb any of the virtual training classes I hold remotely as I work from home. Suffice it to say, these days, any morning I wake up and am not immediately inundated with a wall of construction sound that has but become a form of white noise to my day is noteworthy.
So I enjoyed this moment of Zen. I rose, showered, dressed, made a light breakfast and sat at my desk prepared to work. Still quiet. Excellent. At 9:30am I begin my usual what I call “pre-boarding check” before each session to ensure I have everything I need at the ready. My screens display the correct information. I do not have spinach in my teeth etc.
9:45am I open the virtual training session in case there are early birds and sure enough at 9:50 someone logs in. I chat with the student as others sign in and at 10:00am on the dot all are ready to begin and…
CRASH!–BANG! – RATTLE! THUD! – RUMBLE!
“What? On? Mother? Earth‽ Was‽ THAT‽ ‽ “
[Oh, my natural tendency to cuss like Martin Freeman (it’s safe for work I promise), becomes amazingly rated G when the audio is on for training. My students, all adults, don’t necessarily have that restriction and give a Samuel L. Jackson character a run for the F-bombs that I hear dropped in reaction.]
Oh, did I forget to mention the public school right behind my building? The public school that is closed as its denizens learn remotely? The closed public school which is surrounded by scaffolding and netting? The closed public school which is surrounded by scaffolding and netting that now is in the first stages of refacing its brick façade? The LOUD first stage where they break off chunks of bricks and dump it down a plastic and metal chained chute to land in a huge commercial dumpster oh so conveniently located right outside my [please stand by while I insert Martin Freeman’s imagined, albeit still impressive, string of foul verbiage here] window? Yeah, apparently that is going to be a thing in my life for a while; at least while they work on this side of the building. Grrr!
It could be just my over-active imagination, but I do declare all of the constructions workers had a pow-wow this morning when it was quiet. It must have ended just before 10am because every room in my flat has construction noise seeping or thundering in from outside.
I’m in a conundrum I can’t recall having ever been in before.
My table easel is with blank canvas is up raring to go. My color palette rests between my and acrylics and watercolors.
So does my sketchpad with its plethora of markers and scores of sharpened colored pencils that lay in wait.
All while cursors blink on three different incomplete stories, a half-begun glosa, and a line for what is free form verse for now, but may become a villanelle, a tritina, an octain or…or…
Not to mention an idea in pieces malingering in Photoshop limbo.
And in the midst of the creative storm is not-so-little, not-so-old, but very frustrated me as I find myself singularly unable to do any one of the above because Muse wants to do each and every single one of the above…
Right.
Freaking.
Now.
So instead, I slice and see which comes out on top.
Yesterday was all about Broadway, but I also miss concerts. I have a long history with them.
First concert: The Spinners with Dionne Warwick, NYC 1970s (don’t remember the venue, I was nine or ten years old with my mother).
Last concert: Tituss Burgess at Carnegie Hall, NYC February 2020 (Thank you D-Fab!)
Best concert: Queen, Madison Square Garden, NYC September 1980 (First rock concert, saying I was underage and had NO business being there doesn’t cover it, but by God IT WAS GLORIOUS!)
Worst concert: I’m happy to say I’ve never been a bad concert, not even a ho hum one.
Loudest concert: Oh that’s an easy one – Metallica 2009 at Prudential Center. My ears rang for nearly three days.
Seen the most: Metallica and Jay Z, three times each.
Most surprising: Isaac Hayes live at Prospect Park Bandshell – June 2008. Surprising solely because of the gut punch of his passing away two months later.
Wish I could have seen: – Hands down Prince #1 I don’t know how I let that sexy motherfucker slip through my concert wish list unseen, *deep spiritual soulful sigh of regret*. Also, Nirvana is another one I really wish I could have seen.
Grateful I had a chance to see: Linkin Park in concert at NYC’s Madison Square Garden in July of 2008. LP had to cancel part their 2015 concert tour which included its stop in NYC. In July 2017 we lost Linkin Park’s lead singer Chester Bennington to suicide.
I still have the tickets for the “Welcome to Blinkin Park” concert at NYC’s Citifield Stadium that was scheduled the following week.
Next concert: Live in person? Who knows… Stay tuned…
Raivenne-lations 