A poem needs companions The words of writers Who traveled this path before A poem needs a question Curiosity Wonderings and discovery A poem needs space The distant view out windows Fields to wander in A poem needs light Sunshine to balance the dark Of difficult things A poem needs time A quiet introspection…
Notes: This poem came from an exercise Stephen Dunning and William Stafford’s Getting the Knack. The process is simple: cut out 50-100 words from newspaper titles, then arrange the words into something interesting. I used headlines and advertisements from a couple of old issues of The New Yorker. Dunning and Stafford advise poets to encourage…
Girl in a library So many books A little salvation Wide open grassland No horizon is so far where rivers change direction Lost in the sun Where the bluebird sings to the lemonade springs Peace is every step Two or Three Things I Know For Sure: You are here You learn by living If…
Practice a p act i act ac e a r t Practice a pact i act ace art Notes: This week, I read Bob Raczka’s delightful children’s poetry book, Lemonade and Other Poems Squeezed from a Single Word. Raczka uses only the letters in the word he’s chosen to create the poem and then arranges…
I have sat on your keyboard and erased the message which you had spent twenty minutes writing Forgive me the keyboard felt so warm on my cold paws. ************ I woke you at four a.m. with piteous cries and yowls when you were planning to sleep until seven Forgive me it was so dark and…
1. Find a metaphor: percolating, steeping, fermenting. 2. Consult your horoscope: “Your sixth sense is right on target, Cancer, so trust your instincts today. Stay close to those things that resonate strongly with your morals. The answer is in front of you; you don’t have to search too far afield in order to find it.”…
Who can say cats aren’t holy? Spirit incarnate living poem sacred offering modern totem or maybe the god of love himself come to earth. Notes: My favorite cat, Chipotle, inspired this poem. There he is in the photo! I have been trying and failing to write an acrostic poem for days now. I know,…
Weedy takeover once beautiful garden, now wild. The gardener stands, paralyzed, overwhelmed, on a soft pale green carpet of tumbleweed. Notes: I’m calling this a faux Fibonacci because it was intended to be a Fibonacci poem–only I wrote down the requirements incorrectly in my notebook. A Fibonacci is a poem of six lines with…
people of the fields swift and strong people born along the river river of rivers red like an ember sacred center place of pomegranates land of flames place of abundant fish land of shallow sea beside the water high and beautiful land beside the silvery river place where one stands land of the long white…
This is what I know to be true: to seek change, we must first accept what is. Know that now is not always. And know this too: the path to change is slow. Steady on. Notes: A Golden Shovel poem is created from a line borrowed from another poem. Each word in the original…
