This poem is one I wrote straight out on 2 serviette’s in a Santorini cafe in 2007. I left one behind, took the other with me, but didn’t find it again until a few weeks ago. Huzzah! Tonight at dversepoets.com/this-is-us/ we’re going on a journey. Join us.
Does the sunset at Oia
ever long for lonliness?
To sink unseen in a flare
of reds and ambers
Silently sucking light
out of the day.
Breathing a dragon’s fire
at the night.
Tonight at dversepoets.com Sam Peralta has challenged us to write a sijo – a Korean form of 3 lines containing between 14 and 16 syllables – and its doesn’t end there. Each half-line ideally should contain a 3-5 syllable metre. No pressure then! But huge fun. Go on over there and check out what people have been writing. Here’s my effort.
Beyond mist a blackbird’s lone song reveals the woodland is still there.
While we wait for this mesh to shred, dew diamonds jewel grassy tussocks,
and dawn shrouds this quiet hollow. Wind cannot breach this confined space.
Join us tonight at dversepoets.com/ when we celebrate spring.
Like leaves on trees the race of man is found –
Now green in youth, now withering on the ground.
Another race the following spring supplies:
They fall successive, and successive rise.
(Iliad Book VI)
Bones of the tree claw
at a hard blue sky.
A final visceral act
in this knife cold.
Stripped bare of life,
it savages the air.
This is the tooth and nail.
This is the naked anger,
while all around life threatens to bloom.
Buds begin to soften the frantic scribblings of branches.
Blackbird song urges spring to crest the horizon.
It stands helplessly petrified.
No new life coursing through its arteries.
No coming grace of leafy canopy.
It waits to waste away,
listening to the song of nature.
Tonight at http://dversepoets.com/ Joe Hesch has us looking at a slant on life ‘love, sadness, nature, you name it’. This is one I actually wrote this morning so quite fitting. Come and join us.
My brother is in a foreign country.
The lines of communication broken.
As I lie here, the early morning spring sun
sneaking through curtain gaps,
he comes to me again filling my mind with questions.
Sparrows in the gutter above the bedroom window
flood that quiet air with cheerful chatter.
And I remember those phone calls.
Vibrant, quick jokes and laughter.
Most of all the laughter we hadn’t even shared as boys.
Now all buried by a strange rage I still don’t understand.
Do you remember that Venetian gondala?
The one that lit up, its plastic frame softening
when left on for longer than five minutes. It’s still the best
of those hideous holiday presents we bought each other for fun.
I wonder if you still look for that tat and think of me.
My brother is in a foreign country.
The lines of communication broken.
welshstream 