Tag: NaPoWriMo2019

Day 29 NaPoWriMo- Road Trip Day 1

~ sojourningsmith ~ 1 Comment

Something meditative and tranquil they want for the penultimate poem of NaPoWriMo2019. Also Day 1 of my Road Trip in the Highlands of Scotland.


Passengers

At the beginning

a seagull wheeled in from the Clyde.

All the way up and across , a rib

of  blue reflecting cloudless sky

in Highland waters –

Loch Lomand on our right,

Loch Ochy on our left,

Loch Ness on the right,

Kinlochleven on the left.

Bridges crossed.

Lochs  and locks

on the Caledonian Canal.

Bridges crossed

at the Moray Firth,

at the Donach Firth

until finally rusted iron rails

ran beside the North Sea

looking all

uncharacteristically

tropical turquoise

the gorse on the hills

sending its Malibu cocktail scent

through the car’s air vents,

its acid yellow following all the way

from Strathclyde,

through Loch Lomond and the Trossachs,

Argyll and Bute,

Invernesshire,

Ross and Cromarty,

into Sutherland.

The blue and yellow passage,

seagull call,

the raven beside the road in Glencoe,

the crows scavenging seed

in the downy dales of Easter Ross.

From west to east.

Passengers.

Copyright 2019 Bee Smith 

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Day 28 NaPoWriMo2019 Why Poetry?

~ sojourningsmith ~ Leave a comment

The challenge today is to write a metapoem, or poem about poetry. AKA and Ars Poetica. Archibald Macleish has done this so well that I could weep over my own paltry effort this morning. I commend to you also Marianne Moore, Wallace Stephens and Emily Dickinson. I have considered the nature and purpose of poetry before in this blog here.https://sojourningsmith.blog/2019/03/21/world-poetry-day/.

I begin the first leg of a what will be a week long road trip later this morning. I hope to find wifi along the way to be able to post a Poetry Daily each day. But who knows what the wilds of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland will provide – other than astonishing beauty and inspiration. So, although there may be delayed posts the actual writing of a poem a day will still happen. I have a smaller notebook. I won’t have my magic fountain pen. But travel is supposed to rattle you out of your comfort zone.

Why Poetry?

It's a way to see
360 degrees, 
outside and interior.
Or interrogate
tastes, feelings in words, sound
the heart's echoes in the round.
It's a way to be
free - within lines  that unbound.
You can never be lonely
with some poetry.
Not while it talks with your walk.
It's turnkey and Houdini
unshackling the locks.

 
 Copyright © 2019 Bee Smith. All rights reserved.

Featured Photo by Trust “Tru” Katsande on Unsplash

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Day 27 NaPoWriMo2019

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Today’s prompt is to do a “remix” of a Shakespearean sonnet. Sonnets used to scare me, but since this poem a day lark started last September I have had a bash at them a few times. Some of my efforts I even like (especially the one where Brooklyn Bridge features). Today I chose Sonnet 116, the one that begins


Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116
Riff on 116

Love does not rock and roll when the key shifts.
It's more like jazz - improvisational.
Love keeps making the music that lifts.
Phone home and they always will take your call.
It doesn't matter what dive you are in
some far flung corner of the unknown earth.
They love you famous or has been
or have had repossessed your house of mirth.
Yeah, they know your whole story, chapter, verse,
the back when, the first dance, all your bold hopes,
the down and dirty hours when you cursed
any and every person. But nope!
Love did not flinch. Even when called a fool.
Love knows its mind. And music has its rules.

 Copyright © 2019 Bee Smith. All rights reserved.



Feature Photo by Jefferson Santos on Unsplash

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Day 26 NaPoWriMo2019

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The prompt for today is to use repetition. The villanelle and pantoum use it to great effect. However, I have written a couple villanelles already this month and the pantoum is not a favourite form. I am on the fly this morning as I have a workshop that I need to be out the door to in a little over an hour. Feeding and washing need to also get factored into that time. So I took the quotation that was the jumping off point by my poetry creative colleague Helen Shay. She used a translated quotation from the Anglo-Saxon Exeter Book. “How cruel is sorrow as a companion to one with few dear friends: the path of exile holds fast such a one.”

The Path of Exile

Hold fast to the path of exile,
you with few dear friends.
Keep moving
past your own solitude.
Past the ruined house
your grandfather built 
for his new bride.

Hold fast to the path of exile.
Keep moving.
The past is just a blur of scenery,
a babel of white noise.
Take refuge in your solitude.
Expect no pity.
Hold your face up to the rain.

Hold fast to the path of exile.
Keep moving
past your own solitude,
you with few dear friends
and finding no mercy
for the ghosts that travel
with you along the path of exile.

Hold fast to the path of exile.
Keep moving
past the present. Place
one foot in front of the other.
Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
Hold fast to the  path of exile.
One country is much like another
so long as you can still breathe.

You with few dear friends
hold fast to the path of exile.
Keep moving
with your cavalcade of ghosts
packed in your lone carrier bag
full of what was once a life
you had loved.     Let us walk together.

 
 Copyright © 2019 Bee Smith. All rights reserved.


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Day 24 NaPoWriMo2019 Lexical Slaw

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The daily prompt from NaPoWriMo2019 asks us to take a reference book and choose words from two pages in front of you and go from there. I mixed this up a bit, since it is a bit like an exercise I do in Word Alchemy that I call “Word Salad.” But I choose up to six words that pop up at random and then go about trying to make a connection. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it’s a stretch. Sometimes it’s hilarious. For the purposes of today’s NaPowriMo2019 exercise in poetry writing I left the OED on the shelf and picked up the Chamber’s Dictionary of Etymology, which always makes for fascinating reading. The random words I picked out were spike, exemplary, protest, detest, nomad. They are all in there in some form of their etymological definition.

This was great fun! Who doesn’t love a lexicon?! I’ve loved the word ever since I found it in an Emily Dickonson poem age 11.

Lexical Slaw Word Alchemy

So many versions of how
to know the word universe
in the mind of God
in just about any language

which may be somewhat helpful
to the venturing nomad
searching and incurring
on new pasture

yet even words can splinter
language deflecting into dialect
so dense the origins
get swallowed whole

but something sticks in the throat
like a vow to dissent
that then regurgitates
like a solemn curse

Source document as reference
is public testimony for all to see.
Yet time will free the redactions
of agreed meaning, as necessity
or adventure into word alchemy.

 Copyright © 2019 Bee Smith. All rights reserved.



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Day 23 NaPoWriMo

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First off, apologies for the rat’s nest of a format on Day 22 NaPoWriMo. I was typing it in the WordPress block form in Safari on my iPad Mini. It looked okay, but obviously not! I have reservations about the the WordPress app I have on my device because before blocks came into WordPress it played havoc with any kind of poetry formatting. I needed to practice for my road trip, which starts on April 28th. At least now I can try and rectify or update the app before I go. And if not, then I just have to deal with the limitations because I am not lugging my laptop all around Scotland.

Today’s NaPoWriMo daily prompt is about animals. Living where I do I figured that what I see on a daily basis needed to be front and centre. And I don’t mean dogs or cats. They get enough attention in this blog already. These are Irish cows by the way. They are quite conversational and like to come up to the field’s perimeter to ask for gossip. Therefore, I have salted the Irish for white cow – bo fin – to alert the reader that this is not just any old calf.

White Calf

Wee Bo Fin in the field,
looking outside it 
under the watchful eyes 
of your massive mammy,
would you look at your knobbly knees?!
For all your half-ton weight
you kick up your heels
as gleeful as the little lambies
in yonder pasture.
A sweet wee heffer they would say
of ye, eating spring's sweet new grass
seasoned with buttercup
and cow parsley.

When they load you into the trailer
to go off to mart
you may never hear
your mother's keening moos.
But I will.
For days afterwards.

 Copyright © 2019 Bee Smith. All rights reserved.
white calf

Day 22 NaPoWriMo2019

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…and I am up way to early for the NaPoWriMo prompt to be published on the website. Basically, I fell asleep too early and wound up taking a nap. So after a while I gave up on sleep and began to remember how I loved writing in darkness at winter solstice. Then it got light earlier and I slept a bit later. I am semi-allergic to sunshine and actually prefer autumn/winter to summer. And who doesn’t love spring (except in Elliot’s Wasteland.

So I decided to just to do poetry practice and work with what was staring me in my face. Also, time for another villanelle practice.

Write Ritual

It’s so still. I love writing in the dark.
I write  with a plump peach moon for my lampstand
in silence before those up with the larks
(barring the scratch of my pen making marks,
the twang of  rubberband mental reaches).
It’s so still. I love writing in the dark.
It  redefines what is shadow, and stark.
In the small hours I can explore new found land
in silence before those up with the larks.
I chivvy inspiration’s divine spark.
I write so I might fully understand.
It’s so still. I love to write in the dark.
I like my little nightime writing ark.
I sail in it, ride tides, beach on strands
in silence, before those up with the larks
when all is phosphorescent,  with few sharks
to trouble my inner  night hinterland.
It’s so still. I love to write in the dark
 in silence, before those up with the larks.

Copyright 2019 Bee Smith. All rights reserved.

Day 20 NaPoWriMo2019

~ sojourningsmith ~ Leave a comment 
Whole Nuther

Ye know, that's a whole nuther
sit-u- ation
we don't want to think about,
kiddo. Tarnation!
Gimme that! Ye know, we don't
have to go see
the ships come in at Buckhorn.
It's like Santa.
And Santa's a whole nuther
thing. Thanksgiving!
We got everyone here.
I hate potluck.
Velma insists. I don't want
to hurt feelings,
but...her pierogi is a
whole nuther entirely.

copyright 2019 Bee Smith. All rights reserved.
Bee Smith is participating in GloPoWriMo2019

The prompt for Day 20 NaPoWriMo 2019 is to not use fancy pants poetry speech. Well two phrases from my Pennsylvania childhood leapt out of my hypocampus. It’s not so much monologue as a mall walking stream of consciousness.

Pesach/Good Friday in Stroke City

~ sojourningsmith ~ 1 Comment

As I was opening the iPad mini this morning to check out Day 19’s prompt from NaPoWriMo2019 a random tweet came up on my screen. And that changed my morning routine. There was news of riot and shooting in London/Derry City last night. There! Now you know what the Stroke City in the title refers. It was coined by the late Gerry Anderson, a radio announcer in Northern Ireland. The full or abbreviated version you choose to use tends to reveal a lot about where you stand sectarian wise. A journalist was shot in the melee and died. Right on the the 21st anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement that stopped this kind of thing making the morning news. It’s not that there have not been the odd incidents over the years, but for there to be one so close to this kind of anniversary is just not the way you want to begin your day. Truth be told, with the Brexit wrangles there has been a low level anxiety that things might kick off again. Also, a lot of denial that things will ever go back to how bad things were before the Good Friday Ageement. It all feels especially poignant since I was working yesterday on an EU Peace IV arts project that had children from both Cavan and Fermanagh in the group.Peace building is a long haul process.

So I have scrapped NaPoWriMo for today and have reverted to Poetry Daily type. Thoughts this Good Friday for the family of Lyra McKee, 29, who died in the course of doing her journalism job.

Pesach/Good Friday in Stroke City

Last night, a full moon so bright
it might as well have been daylight.

All the uncertainty has peaked.
Still, it is accord most of us seek.

The danger has not passed.
Blood on the street. But no tear gas.

It is a season of bitter herbs,
salt tears, the temple disturbed.

Once, a generation ago,
on a Good Friday the flow

of hope and history rhymed.
Today, I awake to a report of a crime

too like the past of tension and tears,
when people lived on their nerves and fears.

This was then Planet Normal.
A twenty-one year lull...

Wash her blood from the street.
Pray the Peace never becomes obsolete.
 
 Copyright © 2019 Bee Smith. All rights reserved.
Imagine an island living in peace sculpture Lough MacNean Park, Blacklion, Co. Cavan

Today’s featured photo is my own of a sculpture that looks over Lough MacNean and the border between Fermanagh and Cavan, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Imagine peace…may it be so and make it so.

Day 18 NaPoWriMo2019 – Elegy

~ sojourningsmith ~ 1 Comment

Often what connects people is loss. Poetry is all about making connections. They even have that slogan on the NaPoWriMo.net website banner. Losses…we have all had some, whether it is a loved one – pet or person – or a job, a home, a family. In the way that the universe operates in synchronicity a bedtime conversation last night feels appropriate for the morning’s poetry practice.

Your Daughter

Last night at bedtime
your daughter and I discussed you. 
And really? 
You raised your kids fine.
But they miss you.

Part of it 
is emptying the family homeplace.
First, your clothes to all 
your favourite charity shops.
Then the NHS patient appliances
back to the hospital. Again. But..
It's all good recycling. Still...
your daughter
flees the house absent
of your smell.
Empty now has a scent. Also,
the having to fold 
your reading glasses
found on your bedside cabinet
beside the Jodi Picoult book
you will never now know
how it all ended.

Her friends are kind.
But they are young and think
the object of grief
is to forget its ache.
All she wants to do
is remember you.
So we talk
of what went right
and some of your unlived life.

Just before she leaves
before the lights go out
and kisses my cheek
saying "Night Night"
I tell your daughter how
all daughters
eventually
become their mothers.
Even if only in our small foibles.
Like the reminder notes
I post beside my purse
and on the kitchen counter
for tomorrow
just like
my own mother.
And your daughter
goes to her bed
with a smile.
 
 Copyright © 2019 Bee Smith. All rights reserved.

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