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Look to the margins

Earth day is soon, earthweal is challenging, calling attention. I pick up that phone. Napowrimo wants a rant. Thus, this:

So close, so close we are

We come up with ways

To improve our commutes

Trains and busses and electric cars

We build solar farms to catch the rays

And recycle tons of plastic bottles and bags

Yet we are bigger than these things

And can accomplish so much more

So, why commute at all? Why is it the wage

Over here cannot support a local abode?

How can we fill fields with photovoltaic cells

When so many rooftops and parking lots go without? (Do you see the correlation with food and dollars there?)

And why make plastics at all?

Should there even be

A homogeneous of money?

Or even of food? Or pavement?

The world is heterogeneous

An ingenious melange of all sorts

Diversity demands differences

Another reason not to covet.

The areas around homes and hotels

Are cared for, tidy orderly and picked

Clean of rubbish.

But look to the margins,

The other side of the fence

Passed the grass, along the ditch

Look at what the fashionable

Birds are building their nests with these days.

So much stuff we make

Then break

Then forsake

We are bigger than that. Bigger than this

Our caring needn’t stop at a ditch

A property line, a hedgerow nor border

What are those, really?

20210418

https://www.napowrimo.net/day-nineteen-6/

https://earthweal.com/2021/04/19/earthweal-earth-day-challenge-restore-our-earth/

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I, Ape

The majestic sweep

Of silverbacked mountains

Is the strength of my back

You can see it rippling under

Silver fur. Fists on chest

A show of fang enough

To settle down the young punks.

It is the exertion, the work

That brings this out of me,

The sweat, and the stone

Not where it used to be

20210414

The prompt over at d’Verse has us consider our relationship to animals. After doing a bunch of grunt work, a lot of lifting and carrying, I pretty much exuded this one out of my pores. Won’t you come join us at the pub? https://dversepoets.com/2021/04/13/poetics-the-print-the-whales-make/

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Leucate

Glopowrimo day 12. https://www.napowrimo.net/day-twelve-9/

On the way to Leucate

There to kiss the sea

Ten thousand alternate (time) lines

All lead to that cliff top ledge

Only there can I sing this

There then is the trunk of his tree

All possible routes and all potential

Branches bundled here at the bole

He pilots deep starwaters

With each jump my heart beats

A brave new home in each century

Every now is perched here

An axe to stop his ferryboating

Plummeting to Leucate

20210412

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Dadapre Viousme

April is global poetry writing month, and the prompt today is “ Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a two-part poem, in the form of an exchange of letters. The first stanza (or part) should be in the form of a letter that you write either to yourself or to a famous fictional or historical person. The second part should be the letter you receive in response. ”. And so here is my take on that.

Dear dad

Oh why didn’t you tell me?

Of the hot pleasure of tearing

Things to pieces, of how

Teeth feel when sinking into

Flesh! Pumping my ape chest.

Of humping cast iron

Up the stairs, how that fire

Swollen and large,

Runs across my back and

Down my arms!

Of breath, the smells

Of blood and sweat

And the thumping inside

Alive!

Thank you son

It is so hard to remember

I can barely recognize that

Old me, and how could I?

Those words would have been useless before,

But now you can taste it.

So what can I say to you now

Of rising even higher

When your chest swells

And your heart grows three sizes

Lifting your body with it

How all that straining

Becomes effortless but

Still holds that aliveness

These words cannot show you

That light

Until you have lived it.

But here they are

You’ll not hear them now

But soon. Fear not the cocoon

Mighty beast

You will emerge an angel

20210411

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1968 human, model e

I am

I am

I am

There is much to learn in this meatbag

It is magic, the point of the world.

I am

The fulcrum

I am

A peephole

I am

A chromebook.

This throat is open

Like the fuel tank door

Where everything we need

To move around in this thick

Heavy world comes in.

Some of us fuss over

Seat covers, paint colors

Or levels of trim.

Or continually overload

Worn down brakes

Suspension grim.

Some fine tune and carefully polish

Down to the last nut

Parade down main st

To be seen and to strut.

I’ve come into the machine

Put it on like a meaty mechanical coat

With it I can care or I can gloat

There’s plenty of pockets to put

My pain, and a nifty mind to come

Up with ‘splains. Am I the gas,

That magic elixir, that explosion of light

Or am I the driver, who thinks I’m right?

It’s done a lot today, and has no shame

To remind me with sore back and

Throbbing heels

Can I abandon blame

Endure the feels

And just listen to incredible machine

I am

There is much to learn from this human bone

I am

Learning

I am

Listening

I am

I am

i am

Home

20210408

https://dversepoets.com/

And

https://www.napowrimo.net/day-eight-8/

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New! Grape Charmin!

What a marvel!

To take something in hand

And squeeze.

Will it resist?

Or give in, or burst?

My heart!

In being crushed

Is it resilient, or useless?

Or elsewise?

What a marvel!

Brutalized, Left in a vat

To ferment!

Now I am wine

An appropriate prompt at the Poets Pub, to write a quadrille using ‘wine’. Stop by the pub here: https://dversepoets.com/2021/04/05/quadrille-125-in-praise-of-the-grape/ and give it a taste yourself!

20210405

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No saplings

The haibun is a form of Japanese language, bringing together a quaff of prose with a haiku chaser. Every other Monday this is the prompt at D’verse Poets Pub https://dversepoets.com/2021/03/29/haibun-monday-3-29-21-cherry-blossoms/ where this week Frank prompts us about the cherry blossoms. Just returning from the house described where there is no longer any trace of that tree, but still a persistence of a man, memories are stirred. That kind of poignancy seems very Japanese to me, like Beauty and Sadness.

Here is my haibun:

In front of the house I grew up in was a huge Japanese flowering cherry tree, must have been two feet in diameter and thirty high, with black skin like a lacquered bowl. It was planted by Hicks, from whom my father bought the house in 1972. It’s blooms were big and doubled. It’s color so much brighter after gray winter and before the green of summers. And like pink snow underneath that canopy, falling on Dad’s red and white VW microbus.

Fruitless, he and it

Flower no more in this life

His sons, adopted

20210329