PRISONER 1962
Beacons quicken as seasons change
Letters to editors
flash housewife semaphore:
first robin, chickadee-dot-dee
From fortified kitchens
flares clear rilled sill geraniums--
thirty well-chosen words
on the odd prevalence of pods
Encoded pleas beg decryption--
no one spots the cipher,
cares if baby's shower
has been bundled with bunco night
HERR KEPLER'S NOTEBOOK
Time is the bully anchor of the opposing tug-rope team.
The person with a happy home life tracks glitter through the world; the solitary person leaves snowprints.
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"The grasshopper warbler's song comes up out of the earth just as you think the day is quietening down. It has no prelude or warm-up: it starts midperformance, as if switched on by the dark, as it if has been singing like this beneath the earth until it was dark enough to come to the surface. As if, though we hardly hear it, this singing never stops."
A Year on the Wing (Tim Dee)
All writing and cartoons on this site copyright 2008-2010 Julia Martin, unless otherwise credited.
The person with a happy home life tracks glitter through the world; the solitary person leaves snowprints.
-------------------------------------
"The grasshopper warbler's song comes up out of the earth just as you think the day is quietening down. It has no prelude or warm-up: it starts midperformance, as if switched on by the dark, as it if has been singing like this beneath the earth until it was dark enough to come to the surface. As if, though we hardly hear it, this singing never stops."
A Year on the Wing (Tim Dee)
All writing and cartoons on this site copyright 2008-2010 Julia Martin, unless otherwise credited.
I really, really like this. Some of your poems are like jerky -- you have to chew them for a while. The alliteration is magnificent: I love the way each stanza is sealed with it.
ReplyDelete...cares if baby's shower
has been bundled with bunco night
It's been a little weird reading some of the housewife-poets around the 'hood and realizing how little has changed, really. The story is that we had a revolution and won. If so, it didn't stick very well.
An apt observation that I'd elided over by titling 1962. The baby shower bundled with bunco night indeed occurred in 2008.
ReplyDeleteWe witnessed no revolution, just one skirmish in endless quagmire. Sometimes the decision not to have children feels a genuinely radical act.
So will young women, now faced with climate, economic and cultural chaos, entirely forego childbearing? Cue the Handmaid's Tale, already in progress as nutbars of various political/religious stripes scheme to eliminate access to contraception. I can almost conjure nostalgia for today's despairs.
But to return to subjects of solace, I need to rethink if YOUR teeth are sore. I thus have amended New Year's Resolutions:
1. Be less tangential
2. Be less elliptical
Well, sure, if you like. The chewing doesn't hurt my teeth, and I think it's being good for my own poetry. I'm probably at the other end of the spectrum from you: & now I'm finding myself being a little more parsimonious with syllables, as I write, which I think is a very good thing. There's certainly no reason why every poem needs to flop right on its back & spread its knees.
ReplyDeleteMy work could emulate yours, and at least learn to bat an eye. (Winks being disallowed generally, post-Palin.)
ReplyDelete