A Poem a Day (719): Sea claws

 
A prompt from napowrimo.net: “I challenge you to find a news article and write a poem using (mostly, if not only) words from the article. You can repeat them, splice them and rearrange them however you like. Although the vocabulary may be just the facts, your poem doesn’t have to be.”
 
Here’s draft 2 of my poem and the spliced version follows underneath.

 
Sea claws
 
Choose an article & splice it,
redo, refit, the prompt said,
so I hunted for a happy one, devoid
of war & fighting, death, hate
& suffering. It took a while.
 
So here we are with lobsters,
those snippy little fellows with claws,
a crusher & a cutter, aqua-true
with beady black eyes.
 
Homarus Gammarus, to be posh,
or European lobster to me & you,
paddling the Atlantic to the Azores.
 
In calm waters around St Michael’s Mount,
baby lobsters indulged in their first swim,
all 1,088 of them, ten weeks old
& just an inch long.
 
You’ll need to check a map
as to its whereabouts,
but it’s pretty famous,
so you can probably picture it.
 
It was the end of a challenge
to do 25 releases in 25 locations,
a happy 25th anniversary
to the National Lobster Hatchery.
5,000 little snappers in all.
 
A female lobster can carry 20,000 eggs
in her belly, but only one is expected to survive
out there in the wild.
 
Released from a little plastic tube
they dive down, limbs flaying, scuttling,
to settle on the seabed & burrow
deep into spongy sediment
to spend a year learning how to live
in the bounteous sea.
 
You can even adopt one.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, June 17, 2025

 
 
Sea claws (the spliced version)
 
Happy devoid,
no war, no suffering,
a shakeup into cuteness.
It took a while.
 
With crusher & cutter,
snippy & aqua-true,
Homarus Gammarus paddles
the Atlantic to the Azores.
 
Ten weeks old
& just an inch,
baby lobsters begin
their maiden voyage.
1,088 tiny clappers floating free.
 
A dive down, scuttle
& burrow deep into the sea floor.
They’ll spend a year here,
learning how to live.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, June 17, 2025

A Poem a Day (718): The circle

 
The circle
 
There is a reason
bereft of season
extinct of leaves
that survives emotion,
a release to savour
beyond endeavour
the world’s compassion
amid pure elation,
to seek to celebrate
outside the obstinate
all the indelicate,
afraid to waken it.

Beneath this starlight
jibes another trick
that licked the night,
the way it burned so bright.

We stand still in time
outside of every rhyme,
every turn in the sky
seeking truth, not lie,
fierce oceans ironing out
beyond any doubt
this desire to speak
when you feel so meek,
a vowel left unsaid,
a need unfed.

So we caress water,
defend with laughter,
stand still, naked,
always so eternally naked.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, June 14, 2025

A Poem a Day (717): Crossing water

 
Crossing water
 
We gaze into the ears of seashells,
listen for the soft surf of water’s flow,
the truth of all our destinations,
a lover waiting in the wings,
this always-in-the-ether maybe.
 
We dance on beaches we once drew,
recite conversations we never wrote,
seek recalled waves from all our yesterdays
and watch the sun set into a sleeping sea.
And somehow we are encouraged
 
to walk on, to swim, crash, rise or fall.
So here we are, not so small after all.
We are the waking and the being,
and the rush of something else
we can never get a handle on,
 
but here we are in our looking glass,
reflected in flittering black obsidian,
wondering who stares back at us,
clerical, whimsical, ephemeral,
and we are reborn without even wishing it.
 
Distance is a subtle turn of the page
or a deep dive through a kaleidoscope
of shiftless shapes we cannot even see
until here we stand at the all too familiar
crossroads, seeing only as far as we are allowed,
 
burrowing against our every restriction,
throwing caution to the delight of our heart.
We are the divided outside of division.
We are the wonder that we ever spent this long
drifting.

 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, June 14, 2025

A Poem a Day (716): Exit right

 
Exit right
 
Where she is
she drifts like water flows,
a warm abyss, your welcome
into sweltering rain.
Pure rush, this downpour,
an effervescent everything.
 
And when she subsides
you’ll feel it
in the silences,
the emptied out,
the spaces she’ll leave behind
in the walkout, the exit,
the surrender outside of herself
just to be her.
 
To be the person who lived
before you,
before the accusations,
the dance, the pretence,
the other women you couldn’t ignore,
the criticisms, the putdowns
cos she could never be enough
for you.
 
But she didn’t need to be.
That’s the kicker,
the punch,
your realisation. So,
you’re gonna have to forgive her
cos it was you that wasn’t enough.
She walked through the blizzard
and she kept going.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, June 14, 2025

NaPoWriMo Day 28: Cruel summer

 
Day 28 of the NaPoWriMo challenge at www.napowrimo.net.
 
Prompt: Today, we challenge you to write a poem that involves music at a ceremony or event of some kind.

I decided to write a poem made of loads of titles of songs/albums. See if you can spot them.

 
Cruel summer
 
In the still of the night
he could get no satisfaction:
“What’s going on?”
“Dream on,” the girl replied,
as he gazed at the Waterloo sunset,
thinking how nothing else matters.
He needed a whole lotta love,
but he was living on a prayer.
Am I losing my religion, he wondered,
just like yesterday, or something.
“I wanna rock you like a hurricane,”
he somehow blurted out,
and she sped off down Abbey Road.
Ice, ice, baby! Imagine.
She was a rebel girl. No Maggie May.
He’d hoped on heaven being a place on earth,
but love just wasn’t in the air tonight.
Que sera, sera, he thought.
Layla just wasn’t gonna light his fire
tonight or any other night. She’d pick up
one of the boys of summer instead.
Epic. I will survive, he thought –
I’m a rocket man with great balls of fire –
so he took the midnight train to Georgia,
Gangnam style, just a smalltown boy
looking for his dancing queen.
 
Vickie Johnstone, April 28, 2025

NaPoWriMo Day 26: Night of the hunter

 
Day 26 of the NaPoWriMo challenge at www.napowrimo.net.
 
Prompt: Try your hand at a sonnet – or at least something sonnet-shaped. Think about the concept of the sonnet as a song, and let the format of a song inform your attempt. Be as strict or not strict as you want. 14 lines/10 syllables per line/the Shakespearean sonnet is abab cdcd efef gg. 
 
 
Night of the hunter
 
It’s the loneliest time of the hunter,
this curse of night, an avenging clawed moon.
Bereft of sound, he moves on, a panther
crossing roofs, sunk alleys, life out of tune.
 
There is never a chase, only faint hope
for the North Star’s glow to show him the way.
He wastes no energy, shores up his scope,
outside time, place and the ordinary.
 
He searches land and sea for the one true,
who escaped, pursued, the muse to his art.
A bunch of chaste white roses, the thorns pruned,
he holds, but only shadow in his heart.
 
Her photo lived in his pocket for years,
but her image washed away in his tears.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 28, 2025

NaPoWriMo Day 27: A new chapter

 
Day 27 of the NaPoWriMo challenge at www.napowrimo.net.
 
Prompt: Today we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem that describes a detail in a painting, and that begins, like Auden’s poem, with a grand, declarative statement.
 
I chose Turner’s 'Rain, Steam and Speed' painting (1844).

 

A new chapter
 
Rain, steam, speeds the passage
of time, unheeded, a heady sprint 
into the dust of evening’s song,
an emptying of the greyest clouds.
 
Feel the slight of waiting here
in the station, a huddled pile of clothes.
Suitcase bulging, ticket in pocket,
but he was never going to show.
 
Watch the destinations click down
as you count the years on one hand.
You read all the places out loud until only
one train is left. It won’t wait forever.
 
All steam spirals. It fills the spaces,
the in-betweens, the maybes, lost faces,
all traces of the times even you forgot,
seeks to smother all memory of them.
 
You could stay, but there is no reason,
so you join the departures at the gate.
For there is steam and there is speed,
and there is the rain to make haste in.
 
It washes the dirt from the windows,
your eyes and your skin. It strips clean
the days, the months you stood waiting
until you lost more than just time.
 
You spit on your finger, wipe your shoe,
smooth your skirt, unpin your hat,
open your coat and settle in. You’ve far
to go but already feel lighter.
 
Stone bridges are for crossing,
towns are for leaving. The river spreads
below you, hills rising either side.
Unkempt trees sway, throw blossom away.
 
Each season has a reason, keeps bed for the night.
You open your book to the first chapter,
read the title, see the whole page inked in,
unlike the one you’ve embarked upon.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 28, 2025

NaPoWriMo Day 25: Echoes

 
Day 25 of the NaPoWriMo challenge at www.napowrimo.net.
 
Prompt: In her poem, senzo, Evie Shockley recounts the experience of being at a live concert, relating it the act of writing poetry. Today we’d like to challenge you to write a poem that recounts an experience of your own in hearing live music and tells how it moves you.
 
I went off-prompt for this one, remembering a holiday and standing among ancient rock formations. So, it’s all about sound, and the sound of the place, rather than a concert.

 
Echoes
 
Listen to the earth,
life’s time echo in the red,
deepset against a cyan sky.
Set feet deep, dig down,
synchronise so you’re in balance.
 
Listen to the earth’s drum,
a distinct roll, a heartbeat,
the raindance of the shaman
opening his hands to the cirrus clouds
feeling the weight of the wind.
 
Listen to the earth’s beat
in rhythm, like the eagle’s wings,
a sweeping eclipse of the soul.
In the still you can hear the echo,
the pump of blood through water.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 25, 2025

NaPoWriMo Day 6: Cinnamon

 
Day 6 of the NaPoWriMo challenge at www.napowrimo.net.
 
Prompt: Today’s prompt veers slightly away from our ekphrastic theme. To get started, pick a number between one and 10. Now scroll down until you come to a chart. Find the row with your number. Then, write a poem describing the taste of the item in Column A, using the words that appear in that row in Column B and C. 
My words: cinnamon – wheeze – golden

Cinnamon
 
I light a candle in my vigil,
watch the flame wheeze in the air,
wax trickle into a pool
of silent memory.
 
Cinnamon snakes around me,
serves me a slice of apple pie,
sugar crystallising on warm pastry,
crimped edges tinged golden brown.
 
I can taste it on my tongue,
and suddenly my grandmother is here,
holding out her wooden spoon
as she used to do when we were baking,
 
when I would tiptoe at the table
covered in heaps of snow
to dip my finger in the mixing bowl,
stick it in my mouth with a grin.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 24, 2025

NaPoWriMo Day 7: Made by Matisse

 
Day 7 of the NaPoWriMo challenge at www.napowrimo.net.
 
Prompt: Today, we challenge you to write a kind of self-portrait poem in which you explain why you are not a particular piece of art (a symphony, a figurine, a ballet, a sonnet), and use at least one outlandish comparison and a strange (and maybe not actually real) fact.

 
Made by Matisse
 
I have not the grace of the ballet,
pirouetting among sleek swans
posed in my lace pink tutu,
adorned with a trail of glittering stars.
I do not yearn for the spotlight,
the crowd, the roar, the applause.
 
When the curtain rises, I am not there.
I am backstage in the shadows,
treasuring my anonymity as I roam
soundless and unnoticed, ordinary,
watching each production in private,
my own personal reflection.
 
Each dancer has their own humble story,
away from the lights, flowers and applause.
Perched on the edge of a tin bath,
leg up on the bar catching a conversation
or sat down on a rug washing their feet,
it is only a scene that Degas can tell.
 
I am more like The Snail,
the shifting shapes of primary colour,
ever in motion and twist
across an expanse of empty white space,
always pursuing this something other
ever so slightly out of reach.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 24, 2025