I tried to post this draft poem from my iPad just to see if I could. (I couldn’t.) The effort may have put a crimp in my poetic style! (Ha!) On the other hand, mucking about with technology was a great escape from thinking. Oh well.
All rights reserved. Suggestions welcomed.
Its elephantary!
Yes, I know. The above is not exactly a draft poem, but it has repeating lines, that (sort of) scan. It also has feet!
Enjoy the day!
Draft poem for today. It has nothing to do with taxes!
Buddha Hands
My mother says she was a sassy child.
Her father egged her on, she thinks now, liking
to see whether she could get a rise
out of her own mother, a kind of a tease.
“Terrible,’ she says, and I see
her father, whom I don’t truly remember, as
a sharp-nosed, sharp-tongued man, who nonetheless
had a wink about him, his reddish face rough from the cold of
Minnesota when he ducked into the kitchen to warm up
with coffee and a bottle of brandy stashed
in a cracker tin. He, she tried to please, but her mom, she says,
she could be ornery to.
Yet, when she was tired, my mother says,
her mother, to whom she could be so ornery, would let her
put her head on her lap, and would wipe her hair
back from her face, smoothing her forehead.
It felt so good, she sighs, that now, nearly 88,
she sometimes wipes her own hair back in just that way.
As she speaks, as she stands before me, she palms
the grey strands from the still dark
widow’s peak; she soothes the reddish brow
again and again, passing her hand over and up
her forehead.
I think of how she used to do exactly
the same to me: in the back seat of a car, on a long drive,
where no tasks could tended, and my pointed, busy, mother, stroked
my head. I think too of Buddha hands,
a temple market in Asia, where they were lined up
inside a counter, the tapered fingers
flaked with gilt, and how if there were ever such a thing on this
Earth as freedom from desire, freedom from suffering,
it could be found (for me at least) in that one
smooth space on my forehead where my mother, her mother too,
ran their hands,
without grasping, without clinging, without even
holding on.
All rights reserved. Suggestions welcomed.
PS Sorry to those of you who follow this blog regularly that I sometimes recycle old drawings. This arises from lack of time (and illustrational capacity!)
Day 12 of National Poetry Month. This is also tax season! A very busy time for me. As a result, I’ve found that the only free time I’ve had to do my draft poems in the last couple of days has been on my subway ride to work. The subway (if I have a seat) is actually one of my favorite places to work. It is one place where you really can’t multi-task. Someone else is doing the driving and your handheld computer/smart phone doesn’t work. And, yet, if you are like me, you can always find something else to distract you, something to keep you from writing a really great poem! See below.
That One’s Taken
On subway mornings, I try to write,
to jot down something new and bright.
My brain fills with a melody,
however, most unfortunately,
it’s not composed by me at all,
but from some Broadway musical.
Worse still, I find I’m doomed to hear
the jangling in another’s ear.
Their iPod’s turned up way too loud;
they’re making music for the crowd.
Though that’s just what I long to do–
to be heard by more than one or two–
my spoken tune, my thoughtful rhyme,
some memorable (I hope) line–
I cannot think for all the din,
the pre-played music out and in,
and when I try to write a poem,
I’m stuck in someone else’s song.
All rights reserved. Suggestions welcome.
It seems impossibly soon to be April 10th. It is still cold here in Manhattan! (I am wearing silk long johns and a wool sweater as I write.)
On the other hand, the beginning of National Poetry Month seems very far away.
I have to confess that I spent all day working on a separate graphic design project, which is something I’m not very good at. My slowness depressed me enough that a great deal of dancing was required afterwards. Not Fred Astaire this time, but pure Cole Porter:
Into Porter
The trick of Cole Porter,
other than the high order
of wit, is the double rhyme.
Yes, he writes of bubble time–
champagne and effervescence,
an age’s evanescence–
which he crams into a lexicon
where every single word’s spot on.
(It’s huge! It holds the steppes of Russia
and the pants of a Roxy usher;
Mahatma Gandhi, Mickey Mouse–
all take hands in Porter’s house.)
But, to me, that word cabal’s so cunning,
the terribly banal’s so stunning,
because of the double-barreled rhymes
that punctuate all Porter’s lines.
Alack a day, what can I say,
he’s still the top of all Broadway.
As always, all rights reserved and suggestions welcomed.
Curing Most Ills
National Poetry Month- Draft 4
Epiphany
I would really like to have an epiphany
that doesn’t involve the realization
that death happens.
Why can’t my great enlightenment
alert me to the fact that
chocolate happens?
That peppermint explodes in the mouth?
That a hot bath will cure most ills?
That eggs are unblinking
(until the yolks crack)?
And that the love that always forgives, that is,
the love you give to me,
does not come, like death,
to all, but
like the purest epiphany
wakes just one person
at a time. Thank God, this go-round,
it’s me.
All rights reserved. Suggestions welcome. (It’s a draft!)
Draft poem in honor of April, National Poetry Month.
Sparrow Dreams
I dreamt, years ago, that my infant child was a sparrow.
My husband, just last night, dreamt of a huge pooled grill
upon which customers threw raw steaks.
He also dreams of flying.
I rarely remember my dreams now–I don’t know if I can’t
hold onto them, or if I just don’t have them. But I
dreamt, years ago, that I cupped the small brown bird,
who was my child,
inside my palms.
My husband dreams always, exciting scenarios. Khaddafi makes
a house call; my husband disarms him while
lecturing on the merits of Debussy.
My mother once led, with great difficulty, a horse
down long dark stairs
only to find at the sweaty stoop
a sign that read, “Elevator For Horses
Only.” Close to ninety, she still tells
that dream, but the words sometimes change:
“Horses Shouldn’t Take Stairs.”
My husband likes to tell his when he first wakes;
the surface of his sleep-furred eyes glisten
with the fantastical.
I sat holding my softly-feathered child on a bench
of women before sculptured green. It was
Rockefeller Center, I remember, and that suddenly
I seemed to have put her down, my sparrow child, then
weeping, could not find her.
It was before her birth–when you are pregnant,
you have many dreams–but I knew, when I woke,
that my life was forever different,
that I had been given a fragile, marvelous, chance, a chance
I could not grip tightly (even though it might take flight),
but that I could not bear to lose, not ever.
As always, all rights reserved.
And also, as always, please feel free to let me know comments or suggestions. This is a draft, and it would be wonderful to have guidance as to how to improve it.
Father with child and important package
Draft poem of the day.
Overheard in NYC
Man, breaking from snatches
of Hebrew song, to daughter
in arms (and pink),
“Don’t worry, sweetie, we’ve got
the ukelele.”
(All rights reserved.)
Diamond Enough
After yesterday’s post concerning the relatively higher payback for posts about Robert Pattinson, I am returning to poetry. This is, in part, because the Academy of American Poets announced that it is extending its April program of daily emailed poems for the entire year. (I figure if the Academy of American Poets can post a poem a day for longer than a month, I can too.)
So here’s another draft poem (written on the morning subway). Any suggestions for improvement that you may send are seriously considered and greatly appreciated.
Good Enough
Why is it that they,
the amorphous they,
can never say
you’re good enough
well enough
for you to feel, in fact,
good (enough);
not perhaps like a
diamond in the rough,
much less a diamond buffed,
just not ‘not good enough’.
What can they say
to allay
that bay of inadequacy,
that convenient, if unsafe, harbor,
built-in, if empty, larder?
It sounds like a game,
but if words can tame pain,
rhyme act as anodyne,
it’s worth a shot,
would mean a lot,
maybe, for a short time, enough.
(PS – note that an earlier version of this post incorrectly named the Academy of American Poets. Sorry, Poets! Their emailed poems are a feature called “poem-a-day”. )
K's
30th Day of National Poetry Month, and my 30th (or so) draft poem. I have to confess I’m not sure what I’ll do tomorrow.
This last draft poem is a villanelle. This one came very readily, actually, as I was busy stewing over the day’s mistakes.
For a detailed explanation of the villanelle form, check here; for a comparison between writing a villanelle and assembling a banana pudding, check here. For more villanelles, check out the poetry category from the home page.
As always, pauses in my poems are intended to be made only where marked by punctuation (comma, period, etc.) and not at the end of every line. (I have to say I’m not completely sure of proper punctuation here.)
Finally, thanks so very much for following this blog, reading the drafts and not minding the many–
Mistakes
I make mistakes just writing out my name.
I know the letters, curves, the dotted “i”,
but what was then was then, now’s not the same.
The letter “K”, for instance, no longer tame,
won’t bisect in half with every try.
I make mistakes just writing out my name.
The “u” beginning “us” against the grain,
it wants to sag and limp, become a “y”
what’s then was then, why now is not the same,
why what should be a beam becomes a crane,
not level, but a very uphill climb.
I make mistakes just writing out my name.
How does one make a stand on legs gone lame?
How does one make a song out of a cry?
(When what was then was then, now not the same.)
The green in Spring is yellow, in Fall is flame.
What one can do is endlessly defy
the making of mistakes. I write my name
as I did then, and then. What’s now? What’s same?
ManicDDaily 
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