Poetry Friday: A Personal Collage

Happy Poetry Friday to you all! Today's poem is a little more free-style than my usual route. I'm feeling fast and loose and also looking to shake it up, it's good for the brain to try things that are different and unfamiliar. (On that note, if you're looking to grow your brain, lose and old habit or pick up a good one....check out this fascinating show from my local NPR station about that topic. Super interesting stuff!) Change is good.

I'm sort of letting my mind go a bit and stream-of-consciousness embroidering here with words about what composes my person. It's a little less concrete, sometimes a little obscure but kind of fun. Less story, more mental collage. Kind of like playing darts with my own brain.

Image via Wikipedia

I am the Following

I am a creator of beauty and a pursuer of growth.
I wonder why numbers slip through my memory like silt.
I hear the sticky murmur of yeast rising in bread dough.
I see the clicking shift from grey to pink light in summer.
I want a gold canary to keep me kitchen company.
I am a creator of beauty and a pursuer of growth.

I pretend that my motherhood shift will end at 5 PM.
I feel hungry every morning before I open my eyes.
I touch the faces pressed dully against city bus windows.
I worry about hypocrisy and the way it wrinkles souls.
I cry when my sons are raw in the crook of my neck.
I am a creator of beauty and a pursuer of growth.

I understand that God is love and all love is God.
I say "might as well leave well enough alone."
I dream about flying smoothly, my legs folded in lotus pose.
I try to get up early even if I feel like ignoring the world
I hope for a better garden every year, watered and lush.
I am a creator of beauty and a pursuer of growth.

Please stop by at A Gathering of Books for all the rounded up contributors to today's Poetry Friday. All kinds of good stuff to soak up if you're looking for inspiration.

Hope your weekend is sublime!

Poetry Friday: Married Love

Happy Poetry Friday one and all! I hope you've survived this chilly week in style and are launching into a weekend that will treat you well. I am a walking stereotype, the biggest thing I'm looking forward to is a grocery shopping trip to fortify the house with all my food cravings. Heh. That's what you get when a pregnant woman tells you about her inner life.

Image by Jennuine Captures via Flickr

Sharing a love poem today. This is only the second one I've ever written and although I aspire to emit bodies of amorous verse it doesn't come easily to me. I am very wary of mush and trite sentiment and also of untruth both of which seem more icky than sweet to me.

 Carving Our Initials

Here in our tenth year of marriage, Love has arrived

Gently swooping in to roost in the dormer over our heads.

It came when we traded totems, I saw you let go of your

Iron plans and glinting thoughts to consider and hold mine,

Smooth in my hands like beach stones, well worn and loved.

I have seen you open your mind like a creaking Dutch door,

Allowed it to sag agape, not closing out the interior glimpse.

You have seen me halved like a avocado, showing you my

Damp pit, and you have looked, open eyed on my green center.

Love has been born in our mutual loss and in the tender

Hope that grows up like a bright shoot pressed between

Two people feeling powerless in each others arms.

If you would like to sample the other contributions for this week's Poetry Friday celebration, click over to Wild Rose Reader where our host Elaine is compiling a list of participating bloggers.

Un-Poetry Friday: The Bees Arrive!!!

Happy Un-Poetry Friday!! Too busy staring open-mouthed at my new bees to be able to think up a poem today!!!

The girls, all one to three thousand of them, arrived last night. I took an after-dark, multi-hour, solo road trip to go pick them up and drove home with the big plasticized carton they came in, slightly warm to the touch and faintly humming in the back seat behind me. The bees and I stayed awake listening to country music hits, and gulping McDonald's drive-through coffee...okay, so that was mostly me, but hey, they stayed awake with me while I sipped and sang.

Once home I opened their sealed front door, in their make-shift home and, after just a little bit of staring at them via the light from my iPhone, I turned in, hardly able to sleep for the excitement.  This morning I took a deep gulp and installed them in their new hive, the boys all watching from the dining room window. It was astounding to be handling writhing frames of my own dark honey for the first time in my life. I am so worried that I will hurt them or displease them and somehow jeopardize my almost ten year long dream. Too much pressure!

If I don't answer the phone or the door or my emails, just understand that I am either outside staring at the hive or inside Googling, some new niggling bee question. Sometime soon real life will go on...at the moment, there are only bees!

Poetry Friday: A Color Poem

Happy Poetry Friday! Am feeling a little poetically dry today so I made use of this poetry form to write a little fill-in-the-blank poem about color. Looking through my photos suggested the color I should work on should be orange so I gave it a go.

The form basically works you through how the color you select comes through all five senses. How would it sound? How would it taste? Etc. Kind of a fun exercise. I was the most stumped by how orange sounded.

I have historically had very little to do with this color as I can't wear it super easily but it does suddenly seem relevant and somehow lighthearted.

I'm going to paint our bedroom a soft glowy orange and the kid bath on our second floor will eventually be a bright corally shade. It is the age of citrus. My inner 1970's inhabitant is jubilant, I'm sure; goldenrod the herald of the era returns.

Shades Of Citrus Season

Orange
A snapping bonfire
Curving sickle slices of canteloupe
The pricked ears of a fox
The lyric gush of cider from the jug
The caramel thrum of a cello
The sizzing sputter a sparkler makes
Nose tweaking ginger, grated fresh
A latte heavily sprinkled with cinnamon
Braised meat falling richly off the bone
The electric zap of midwinter static
The shush of cross country skiis
Th rattle of dried beans, poured through the fingers
Orange can swirl richly or zip, by turns.

Check out the Poetry Friday roundup over at Madigan Reads.

Related articles

• "The Color Orange" (itsinfoworld.wordpress.com)
• Color In Design: Orange (blogs.sitepoint.com)

Poetry Friday

New weekly feature here on my blog, "Poetry Friday." I was inspired when a blogger I read linked to this inspiring blog where the owner has challenged herself to write a poem a day (200 something, straight in a row so far!) and I also happened to be sitting down making a list of all the things I'd like to dust off in my life and one them happened to be that I wanted to spend more energy on my poetry.

Sometimes things just come together like that. So, I have joined in on Poetry Friday. I hope that I will write on-the-spot original poetry most weeks, but sometimes I may share poems I love by other authors or poems I've written at other times in my life and a little of the context.

Coincidentally, Melissa, the blogger who first led me to the daily challenge has begun her own Friday poetry highlight. See this week's edition to get a taste. Great minds think alike.

Today I am sharing a poem I wrote two years ago about this time of year when I set a little writer's prompt up for our mutual stimulation and suggested we each write an autumnal poem that has something to do with marking the season without connection to nature.

I had forgotten that I wrote it and then when I started baking again this fall in our new kitchen I discovered that our old oven is a little prone to be smoky and now when I start to cook Ru says worriedly, "Do you think it will make smoke?" And then winces in the direction of the "smoke proptector." Heh heh.

A Rite of Fall

In autumn my remembered

 Oven develops

 An appetite for

 Clouds of smoke,

 Belching them towards the

 Dozing smoke detector,

 To awaken him from

 Cobwebbed summer slumber.

Happy weekend everyone!

Spa Night and A Favorite Site

Well, Friday is here and with it, a cozy weekend. We have small plans, things like "make a loaf of bread" and "walk through the flowers" and nothing terribly ambitious. Its a good time of year to not be very ambitious. So yummy and lazy out.

We're starting off the weekend in fine style with a wonderful night of couple spa time. Foot soaks, massages and languid sitting around together. I am ready.

While we soak our tooties...why don't you take in one of my very favorite sites that makes me extremely happy. Young Me, Now Me. Such genius. Some of the photos are amazing. I plan to do one of my own (not for the site persay but, maybe just for you folks here)...someday.

I hope your weekend is wonderful, your children hug you, and that whether you have rain or sun, you take a moment to breath deeply and really smell it coming down around you.