A Poem a Day (657): NaPoWriMo Day 26 - Down

 
Day 26 
 
Prompt: write a poem that involves alliteration, consonance and assonance. 
 
 
Down
 
Tunnelling Tarquin under, in the unseen,
looking low for a clearing in the obscene,
the grey-grime tumult of a city scene
afloat with sold, slick petroleum slime.
 
Visages of visitors, suitcases snagging,
stick and slide in slush and mud and gin,
escaping the smother, the fog, drawn thin,
the slay of a thousand hungry tongues.
 
Someone drew a way out in a line of chalk,
but it only exists if you can walk the talk.
The voiceless view only a cover of dust,
an estrangement in an ever-torn maze.
 
On a wide wood plank, sailors signal times
to the softest seas, mountains, myriad lines
of cirrus cloud, swept out so far it pines.
You will not see its true intention,
 
and it blows, how it blows, and it’s white
upon white upon white, flying for light.
And if you stay under too long this blight,
you’ll wither in the raw of your bones.
 
Starlings swarm where the skies rake dry
from a drip-down dawn, a saved goodbye.
It’s where the old ghosts walk in solitude,
where the lost eventually deign to die.

Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 26, 2024

A Poem a Day (656): NaPoWriMo Day 25 - What is your idea of perfect happiness?

 
Day 25
 
Prompt: we’d like to challenge you to write a poem based on the Proust Questionnaire, a set of questions drawn from Victorian-era parlour games and adapted by modern interviewers. You could choose to answer the whole questionnaire, and then write a poem based on your answers, answer just a few, or just write a poem that’s based on the questions. We have a fairly standard, 35-question version of the questionnaire.
 
 
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
 
Too many empty gaps in the question,
not enough breaths of daylight
in an expanse of deep happenstance.
A trip-up. It was a trick question after all.
 
It needed a whole list of answers. And more
questions. It wasn’t just one thing.
But then she’d forgotten.
She lost her smile along the way.
 
He said she used to be fun when they met.
He asked what she was wearing; said she looked
like shit. All her friends were wrong for her,
he said. And her light had gone.
 
There were so many things she’d lost,
at some point, somewhere along the way.
 
Lost, and not refound. But maybe, just
maybe, she never needed those things.
He was no longer there, a heavy weight,
watching. He was an absence. A quiet.
 
Now she could dance if she wanted to,
anywhere in the house, even the shower,
abandon her clothes like an unkempt,
multicoloured body by the front door,
sleep with the cat and not feel him seethe
because an animal was getting more attention.
 
It seemed like another life, a dreamed-up existence,
a postcard bereft of a forwarding address.
 
Turning her mother’s fountain pen in her hand,
she gazed at the bright, young woman on the wall.
Posed against a mountain peak, she smiled,
smiled with that open innocence of youth.
 
‘Dear daughter,’ she wrote. ‘I just thought of you,
as the answer to a question I was asked today.’
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 25, 2024

A Poem a Day (655): NaPoWriMo Day 24 - Moondance

 
Day 24 
 
Prompt: write a poem that begins with a line from another poem.

The first line is from Walter de la Mare’s Silver.
 

Moondance
 
Slowly, silently, now the moon
cherishes this gift of silver starlight.
Reflects the eerie arcs of her face
in the dark dish of swan lake.
 
Weeping willows gather in a wave
of green, hushed, heads bowed,
reeds dripping at the water’s edge.
Still surface breaks, shoots an echo
far into the night to the next bay,
a message of wisdom from the fae.
 
A cloud sweeps lunar cheekbones,
and in that second the willows step back,
sweep the lengths of their leaves upward,
stretch the tips of their limbs to the sky.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 24, 2024

A Poem a Day (654): NaPoWriMo Day 23 - Gingerbread

 
Day 23 
 
Prompt: we’d like to challenge you to write a poem about, or involving, a superhero, taking your inspiration from these four poems in which Lucille Clifton addresses Clark Kent/Superman.
 
I wrote the first draft of this today in a pub with a small glass of Merlot by the sea. It's dedicated to my own personal superhero.

 
Gingerbread
 
It’s the smell of gingerbread rising,
fruity, tart, malty. A scent I know well.
It beckons me to follow, unseen,
like a misty finger signalling,
summoning me to do its bidding.
Dough rising from a hard, biscuit base.
It’s the smell I’ll remember decades on
when I am old and she is gone.
 
I don’t know how to make gingerbread,
but I know how it makes me feel,
taking me back to much simpler times
when my hands barely reached the table,
my eyes fixed on the china mixing bowl,
imagining what it would taste like,
if only my tiptoed me could reach it.
If I was lucky, I’d get a lick of the spoon.
 
Now, I think of all the things out of reach,
the times I was just too far from home
to relate the new crisis – the failed romance,
the lost job, endless soul-searching, the always
feeling you’re not quite good enough,
but she was always waiting there,
forever at the end of the telephone.
 
Sometimes she’d say pull up your big knickers
and just get on with it, to let things go.
She was always willing to offer her shield,
always ready to drop everything and listen,
because that is what a superhero really is,
when you’re afraid and you’re far from home.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 23, 2024

A Poem a Day (653): NaPoWriMo Day 22 - The art of drawing

 
Day 22 
 
Prompt: this one comes from the poet and fiction writer Todd Dillard, who provided this idea on his twitter account a few months ago. The idea is to write a poem in which two things have a fight. Two very unlikely things, if you can manage it. Like, maybe a comb and a spatula. Or a daffodil and a bag of potato chips. Or perhaps your two things could be linked somehow – like a rock and a hard place – and be utterly sick of being so joined. The possibilities are endless!

The art of drawing

It’s just a trick of the light,
this slight of moonscape paper,
the edges faded, jaded, kind of.
A stroke of charcoal pauses.
 
Reconsidered, his bland idea turns
on its side, snap-ricochets, becomes
a suspenseful thing of mystery,
a curve, a sigh, an artificial high.
 
She steps shyly into the empty scene
from out of it, finds life from nothing,
enters his heart as his pure imagination
finds her, scribbles in her loose curls.
 
A heart-shaped face, soft, full lips,
slightest touch, an upturn to her nose,
flash of pink across the cheekbones,
so high as to lend a paper cut.
 
She smiles and the landscape grows,
a woodland cross-hatched behind her.
Curves and lines, a crescendo in form,
lithe arms upraised, she dances alone
 
in this blown bubble she inhabits.
You can almost smell her, feel her,
the lightness of her walk, and then…
the music jars. An error, a smudge!
 
The artist’s hand reaches for correction,
rubs the foul point with the eraser’s edge,
but it streaks, ruins the silk of her dress.
A hard thrust, and it bounces off the wall.
 
He sits back, shoves the easel and scowls,
scanning the studio for his arch enemy.
Knocked, the charcoal drops and splinters.
From the wooden floor, an eraser chuckles.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 22, 2024

A Poem a Day (652): NaPoWriMo Day 21 - Greenest glade

 
Day 21 
 
Prompt: write a poem that repeats or focuses on a single colour. Some examples for you – Diane Wakoski’s Blue Monday, Walter de la Mare’s Silver, and Dorothea Lasky’s Red Rum.

 
Greenest glade
 
In deep trodden, mossy earthen beds
of nodding, silken tulip heads,
a spill of fresh rain scented green
splatters down my silver screen,
 
water mixing light, the purest gold,
something wondrous to behold.
In this leafy glade that shelters folk,
the Green Man haunts the oldest oak.
 
Raindrops slide in a figure eight,
wide owl eyes, a flight out late,
this symbol of all eternity kept,
still life where no one has yet slept.
 
Rainbow sneaks from glowering nimbus
and I wonder how the day will find us.
Waking green, bright emerald hue,
this crazy shine can only be you.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 21, 2024

A Poem a Day (651): NaPoWriMo Day 20 - Heart of stone

 
Day 20 
 
Prompt: write a poem that recounts a historical event. In writing your poem, you could draw on your memory, encyclopedias, history books or primary documents. 
 

Heart of stone
 
A heart of stone
sits on the mantelpiece,
it never gets dusted,
locks its history inside.
 
Your eyes flit to it, wherever
you stand in the room. Grey,
chipped, heavy and cruel,
somehow it fell.
 
The wall it hails from grew
four metres from the earth,
the outer of an inner parallel.
Between them sat the ‘death strip’,
where the people dodged gunfire
under an all-seeing moon.
 
They pierced Berlin’s heart in 1961,
divided it in two with concrete
to keep every East German out.
Soldiers watched them night and day
from 302 watchtowers. Somehow, 5,000
crossed over, but 191 died trying.
 
They thought it would never end,
but the Peaceful Revolution brought it down.
Thatcher didn’t want it to fall.
Luckily, no one listened to Thatcher.
 
The ‘Shield and Sword of the Party’,
the Stasi, with its quarter-million spies,
were no longer needed, the people released
from this orchestrated campaign of
surveillance pitting friend against friend,
lover against lover.
 
They drilled holes in walls to listen and watch,
paralysed victims by destroying reputations,
crushed relationships, sabotaged careers,
split families in half with paid betrayals.

A time of travel bans, gaslighting,
smear campaigns and bugging.
Social isolation, then suicide was rife,
so if the guards didn’t shoot you…
 
When the wall finally crumbled,
people found their own surveillance files,
discovered they were one of millions.
Most of the ‘unlucky’ had never known why.
 
They said it would never come down,
but in the end it could not stand.
It couldn’t outlast the will of a people
determined to be free.
 
Vickie Johnstone, April 20, 2024

A great book on the Stasi is Stasiland by Anna Funder.

A Poem a Day (650): Sunrise

 
Sunrise
 
So small.
A peck. A dot. It slides,
honey spilling out.
 
A pencilled-in line or two
makes merriment,
and we are beyond talk.
 
An aside, like a sandwich
sat on a dish, waiting 
to be devoured.

Someone waves out there,
but it’s just breeze.
It goes unnoticed.
 
Surf sounds, soft curves,
the horizon lights up.
A bird flutters out.

Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 20, 2024

A Poem a Day (649): Macbeth

Macbeth
 
Colouring in the edges
of style. The scene sets, a stage
wracked with unconditional charm.
 
They act in parts. Depart apart,
together, unchained, eclipsed,
two swans gliding on water.
 
It’s a fake battle with plastic swords.
The dressing-up comes easy,
but the lines, the lines are lost.
 
Someone laughs and the game’s up.
There are no words because he forgot,
and so the curtain must come down.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 20, 2024

A Poem a Day (648): NaPoWriMo Day 19 - Haunted

 
Day 19 
 
Prompt: write about someone haunted by something. Then change the word haunt to hunt.
 

 
Haunted
 
He paints faces in the stone-dead walls,
this silent loitering without intent,
a shadow bypassing other people.
He hunts all the spaces in between.
 
Bricks sit etched with the blood of life,
a chalk outline washed by rain still stains
the pavement where we walk in line.
Everyone sees it. No one says a word.
 
They talk about the sky or a tree or a song.
She doesn’t like to talk about him at all.
Her work colleagues don’t even know he exists.
She wonders if he has one single regret.
 
Every Sunday, she would have to see him.
Aghast, she’d check her face in her compact,
fix it the way you would fix your lipstick.
And pray he’d behave in front of their child.
 
He always smiles. She hates how he smiles.
So hollow, the way the lips curl back,
his teeth, sharp-edged like graveyard stones.
He is the wolf. A wild, snarling wolf.
 
Sometimes she spots him in the street,
or in the sun-haze of a shop window.
Just one second. And then he’s gone.
Or maybe he was never really there.
 
The hunter and the hunted.
If she closes her eyes, she can wish him away.
Today, she opens them, looks down at the chalk.
It marks the position of her body yesterday.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 19, 2024

A Poem a Day (647): NaPoWriMo Day 18 - The eagle

 
Day 18 
 
Prompt: we’d like to challenge you to write a poem in which the speaker expresses the desire to be someone or something else and explains why. Two possible models for you: Natasha Rao’s In my next life let me be a tomato and Randall Jarrell’s The Woman at the Washington Zoo.

 
The eagle
 
You think you covet nothing,
that while you may not be enough,
this is you, the only breath you know,
born from that lone child in the mirror
who once stared quizzically back at you,
and you can heal, see it through,

but there’s a sharp cliff edge inside,
a rip, a tear. It shouldn’t be there.
Sometimes it bends. Sometimes it grows.
Stagnation is not a natural way to be.
 
We watch the eagle from the ground,
wings outstretched, a plane in spiral,
swift, sure, existence quantified.
A true power in its escape into the blue,
into the still, the lightness of pure air,
a kaleidoscope opening inside into out.
 
He dives on the updraft, skates almost,
spying humans living like specks of dust.
The mighty hunter, escape artist, swift
in his pursuit of truth. We stand below,
heads craned to the sky. Unseeing us,
he soars up into the arms of cirrus.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 18, 2024

A Poem a Day (646): NaPoWriMo 17 - Ephedra (inspired by a song of the same name)

 
Day 17 
 
Prompt: we’d like to challenge you to write a poem that is inspired by a piece of music, and that shares its title with that piece of music.
 

Ephedra (inspired by a song of the same name)
 
Life opening. A window rising to the soul.
Moon dust recalls a lost night’s shade,
aimless wanders in moods of endless dark.
Motion turning. How it always turns.
 
Bric-a-brac, a walk back, a curve in this time,
the only one, and we can never be forever,
this trip back, this screwing with a reality done.
I am me, and you are you. We can never meld.
 
Notes in streams lift light, fulfilling white energy,
bubbles cross a distant spray. Soft surf lifts so
this shine will never ebb. The echo of a return.
We are one, but never were one. We are two.
 
You record a lyric and dream on its company,
rhythm sweet, the way it moves, its breeze,
as though we sail on a never-shrinking sea,
live inside colour chords, the curve of the true.
 
This hard shell, heartbroken, dug out of sand,
smooth arch of the blessed, we listen in,
content as if this wide world moves in tune,
only for our audience, only for us. Just we.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 17, 2024

A Poem a Day (645): NaPoWriMo Day 16 - The mile

 

Day 16

Prompt: we challenge you to write a poem in which you closely describe an object or place, and then end with a much more abstract line that doesn’t seemingly have anything to do with that object or place, but which, of course, really does. The surprise ending to this James Wright poem is a good illustration of the effect we’re hoping you’ll achieve. An abstract, philosophical kind of statement closing out a poem that is otherwise intensely focused on physical, sensory details.

The mile

I walk the latent mile, mud-spattered,
curves in the distancing, mirroring,
the sun blazing stripes over this chill clime,
and I am lazy in my own clamber up,
over, trailed by a tail of twisted lanes.
 
Jagged trees arch, create spiky picture frames
through which to spy on the frozen horses,
shaggy brown, grey and dappled, the last
in his blue coat. The hands of the hills span
out, palms rising to circling cirrus clouds.
 
I listen to the even echo of my footsteps,
the hum of a bumble’s bounce, trill lark
and a chuckle of sparrows hedge-haunting.
Beside a white birch, a baby rabbit curls silent.
I try to shake the ghost of my own self loose.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 16, 2024

A Poem a Day (644): NaPoWriMo Day 15 - Green envelope

 
Day 15

Prompt: take a look at @StampsBot, and become inspired by the wide, wonderful, and sometimes wacky world of postage stamps. For example, while it certainly makes sense that China would issue a stamp featuring a panda, it’s less clear to us why the Isle of Man should feel the need to honour 2001: A Space Odyssey in stamp form. From Romanian mushrooms to Sudanese weavers to the Marshall Islands getting far too excited over personal computing, stamps are a quasi-lyrical, quasi-bizarre look into what different cultures (or at least their postal authorities) hold dear.

 
Green envelope
 
Mit Gutem Wünschen, he cherishes
a childlike rainbow splurged into being,
perfect arches scrawled across broken skies,
the ghost-like wafts of pearl cirrus caught
chasing dreams where there was only blue.
 
This pale green cage of ours belies time,
sacred nature’s seal on our soul.
We open it to peer inside at mirrors,
curving spaceless, excluding nothing at all,
and yet we only feel the borders around us,
the fences we built to keep all dangers out
now working to shield us shut within.
 
We are nothing but the acorns strewn.
The number 55 marks our final year,
impatient like two runners interposed.
Deutschland stamps us in one country,
the place of our birth, a retrospective.
 
We open the envelope, push it so far,
seeking to stretch as far as we can go,
follow this many coloured hope of ours
to travel this endless maze back to ourselves
and all those things we find meaningful,
but it can close upon itself just as easily
if we are looking the wrong way,
Mit Gutem Gewissen.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 15, 2024

A Poem a Day (643): NaPoWriMo Day 14 - In the never of the ever

 
Day 14

Prompt: write a poem of at least 10 lines in which each line begins with the same word. This technique of beginning multiple lines with the same word or phrase is called anaphora.

 
In the never of the ever
 
In the never of the ever cast aside,
in the rolling of this sacred endless tide,
in essence strewn, a being, no need to hide
in this arched second shore of becoming
in someone else’s eyes something, waking.
 
In the never of the ever to be without,
in sinking deeply in and effervescent doubt,
in the purest sense, an endless rhythm’s flow
in waves of shocking colour, ribbons of rainbow,
in search of this difference always out of reach.

Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 15, 2024

A Poem a Day (642): NaPoWriMo Day 13 - Sea sounds

 
Day 13

Prompt: play with rhyme. Start by creating a word bank of 10 simple words of one or two syllables. Five should correspond to each of the five senses (i.e., one word that is a thing you can see, one word that is a type of sound, one word that is a thing you can taste, etc). Three should be concrete nouns and the last two should be verbs. Now, come up with rhymes for each of your 10 words. Use as much sound play in your poem as possible.

The words: 
Sea, shush, salt, sad, heat, sand, surf, cliff, leap, dive

The rhymes: 
Sea, me, bee, fee, we
Shush, blush, mush, such, gush, hush, lush, plush, rush,
Salt, fault, caught, halt, naught, taught, vault
Sad, mad, bad, cad, fad, glad, had, lad, rad, tad,
Heat, seat, meet, teet, beat, feat, neat, wheat
Sand, hand, band, land, rand, wand,
Surf, turf, birth, worth, dearth,
Cliff, miff, biff, fifth, riff, stiff, tiff,
Leap, deep, heap, reap, seep, weap
Dive, five, hive, jive, live, vive, wife
Flow, glow, mow, sow, bow, how, low, now, plow, row, tow, vow, wow
 

Sea sounds

Be the sea and me, we weave full-flow,
this gush so lush, this hushed rush and glow.
 
Sweeping our hands in sand, on land we sow,
this leap so deep, we will not weep and bow.
 
Will you jive, hi-five, just live or borrow
a tiff with the wife, strum a riff too shallow.
 
Here the salt once caught halts a no-fault vow,
greet the heat’s hot beat, treat a neat rain shadow.
 
Beside this lad so rad, we’ll wade no sorrow,
this deep leap keep so no echo seeps tomorrow.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 13, 2024
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

A Poem a Day (641): NaPoWriMo Day 13 - The note

 
Day 13

The note
 
In the time it takes to read this note,
I’ll be gone.

In the time it takes your fist to crush it,
I’ll already be on the first bus out of town.

In the time it takes to check my wardrobe,
I’ll be holding out my hand at another bus stop.

In the time it takes to check my drawers,
I’ll be running with my bags to the railway line.

In the time it takes for realisation to set in,
I’ll be calming my breath as the late train leaves.

In the time it takes for you to grab your keys,
I’ll be blocking whole memories out of my life.

In the time it takes for you to lock the door,
I’ll be planning a route you can never guess.

In the time it takes for you to start your car,
I’ll be praying slashed tyres won’t take you far.

In the time it takes for you to throw a punch,
I’ll be promising that no more will land on me.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 13, 2024

A Poem a Day (640): NaPoWriMo Day 12 - In support of kittens

 
Day 12 

Prompt: write a poem that plays with the idea of a ‘tall tale’. American tall tales feature larger-than-life characters like Paul Bunyan (who is literally larger than life), Bulltop Stormalong (also gigantic), and Pecos Bill (apparently normal-sized, but he doesn’t let it slow him down). If you’d like to see a modern poetic take on the tall tale, try Jennifer L. Knox’s hilarious poem, Burt Reynolds FAQ. Your poem can revolve around a mythical character, one you make up entirely, or add fantastical elements into a real person’s biography.

In support of kittens

 
He wasn’t a tall man. He wasn’t a rich man.
Some would say he wasn’t even a good man.
But he had his moments. He didn’t brag.
He just knew his mind and chose to say it.
 
Those walls have gotta come down, he said.
There are too many of those goddamn walls.
Too many rules, too many obstacles,
no clear instructions for the things that matter.
 
People told him it was best not to point it out.
But there are too many walls, he said.
Too many people have been shafted,
too many people are stuck,
too many people on the poverty line,
too many sunk beneath it.
 
Everyone just shook their head, said it is what it is.
Sometimes the sun went up. Sometimes it went down.
He was a straight-talking kind of man.
But nothing he tried to say made a difference.
 
Some said he wasn’t too clever, he had a big mouth.
But one fine day, he took a hammer to that wall.
Overnight he appeared to grow two feet taller.
Then they said he wasn’t a small man, but a giant.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 12, 2024