Friday, September 04, 2020

In This Together

—Poetry and Photos by Taylor Graham, Placerville, CA
—And scroll down for Form Fiddlers’ Friday!



LATE SUMMER AUBADE

Clouds are a bruised shade
of contemplating storm.
Small birds withhold their warble.
Awk!
fragment of sound like
Diet Coke released by its pull-tab
or scissors ripping out a seam.
A corvid
long-ago/this-very-moment
squawk of disgust
at humans—
you and I with our same old
morning song,
our hopes of improving
by tomorrow.






AUGUST 19 LUNES 
      wildfire on the morning news

The blood sun           
rises through canopies of oak,
will not set.

A small horse shelters
against rails,
flames range the pasture.

There’s no count
of gone houses—only time
to get out.

Smelling no smoke yet
still we cough—
anticipation?
 





BORING DOWN

Are we bored with August?
Hot, dry, end-of-summer malingering.
Every summer seems hotter,
smokier than last year, menacing ever closer
to home. Bored? Turn on the TV.
The same litany of statistics, bad news.
How many hurricanes at once,
how many wildfire complexes, how many
hundreds of thousands of acres.
Boring? Underfoot,
crackle of brittle brown deadfall
with visions of coming to life
again in flame.



 Patti in Water



NO BORING HOME-COMING

A matter of trailer doors—in one, out the other.
We were greeted by a rogue Tervuren dog, dusky red
shadow dashing through metal he’d pried open
with canny teeth. He left us our two bitches in heat
&—in Nature’s course—if not quite one hundred
at least 16 moon-eyed whelps, harvested as
from the cabbage patch. No two pups looked alike.
“International Shepherds” we called the
inheritance, names we couldn’t register,
wouldn’t scribble in our German kennel book.
But oh sweet, foxy Pattycake, the one we kept,
silken sable hair that wound itself with cockleburs.
Patty who ran the unfenced ridges &,
in due time, into death, still free running.






WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER

Wet mop releases
4 earwigs
& 1 tiny frog.

Share the pre-harvest
with bugs & ground squirrels—
my garden’s gone.

Pandemic & drought,   
wildfire &
job losses, what’s next?

Blue sky overhead
this morning, but still hazy
at the edges…






GIVEN UP FOR DEAD

For months I mourned that stump left
by woodcutters. Tall
bald-ugly-dead, that once was
graceful Valley Oak—
But look, this morning it’s crowned
with green. A spray of
tough young leaves bursts like hope
to greet rising sun.



 Patti at Home
 
 
Today’s LittleNip:

BEING WALKED BY MY DOG
—Taylor Graham

A dog on a walk is like an explorer
whose aim’s to discover who got there beforer.
The smells that he scents
are all major events—
nothing tedious or ho-hum or boring.
To lover-of-life, the whole mess is alloring,
to be writ in dog’s brain-journal duly.
Yes, his world’s every moment brand-newly. 






Good morning and many thanks to Taylor Graham today for her lively poetry and for sending us some forms: Lunes (“August 19 Lunes” & “We're All in This Together”); an Imago (“Given Up for Dead”); and a Nasher (“Being Walked by My Dog”). She also included an Aubade ("Late Summer Aubade"), which is more of a type of poetry rather than a structured form. See Medusa’s Form Finder at the end of this post for links to definitions of these forms.

And now it’s time for Form Fiddlers’ Friday!

___________________

FORM FIDDLERS’ FRIDAY! 

It’s time for more contributions from Form Fiddlers! Each Friday for awhile, there will be poems posted here from some of our readers using forms—either ones which were mentioned on Medusa during the previous week, or whatever else floats through the Kitchen and the perpetually stoned mind of Medusa. If these instructions are vague, it's because they're meant to be. Just fiddle around with some forms and get them posted in the Kitchen, by golly! (See Medusa’s Form Finder at the end of this post for links to definitions of the forms used this week.) 

This week most of our Fiddlers have been quiet—off partying for Labor Day Weekend, I guess, leaving Taylor and Carl Schwartz (Caschwa) to carry the load of poems written in form for this week. Well, both of them are highly capable of filling in; Taylor’s forms are posted above, and here are three from Carl: a Nonet, a Clogyrnach chain, and an Acrostic:


RESTRICTED FURNITURE (Nonet)
—Caschwa, Sacramento, CA
 
we have an unwritten law passed down
for untold generations that
people of color must sit
modestly on the floor
awaiting their turn,
permanently
out of sight
of the
chair
 





Here is what Carl has to say about this next poem: “My poem, ‘An Army of Pink’, was written in tribute to the outstanding skills of U.S. Representative Katie Porter, who appeared on TV [recently], tearing apart the new head of the Post Office for not knowing some basic details about the office he was appointed to lead.”
 

AN ARMY OF PINK (Clogyrnach chain)
—Caschwa

a serious army of pink
is not boding what you would think
unstoppable claws
aimed right at your flaws
biggest jaws
must then sink

more frightening than Wiki-Leaks
smart phones abound and sneak their peeks
televised worldwide
viral won’t subside
secret died
now it reeks

you can’t clean up the mess you made
by hiding outcomes in the shade
you missed the whole can
face it like a man
flames you fan
truth betrayed






INTUITIVE (Acrostic)
—Caschwa 
 
you have at your disposal all you need, to
know all you need to know, so
what is stopping your rise to glory?
I’m a genius, of course, no longer
trying to convince rocks
to adore me.
say something smart

_____________________

OK, that’s it for this week, and thanks to Taylor and Carl for their fine fiddling! Would you like to be a SnakePal? All you have to do is send poetry—forms or not—and/or photos and artwork to kathykieth@hotmail.com. We post work from all over the world, including that which was previously-published. Just remember: the snakes of Medusa are always hungry—for poetry, of course!

Here are links to the forms shown this week:

MEDUSA’S FORM FINDER:

•••Acrostic: literarydevices.net/acrostic
•••Aubade: www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/aubade

_____________________

—Medusa
 


 —Public Domain Photo Courtesy of Joseph Nolan





















Photos in this column can be enlarged by
clicking on them once, then clicking on the x
in the top right corner to come back to Medusa.









Posted by at