PAD Challenge Day 23

I just wanted to mention three new chapbooks from Maverick Duck Press:

Ordering the Hours, a new collection by my friend, Chicago poet Donna Vorreyer,

Taking Turns, a collection of winners of Eratosphere's "Sonnet Bake-off" contest (edited by Anna Evans), and

Still Quick, Always Dirty, a collection of poetry by the Quick and Dirty Poets of Burlington County NJ, of which I am a member.  Each of us (Kendall Bell, Anna Evans, Don Kloss, Bronwyn Haynes and yours truly) has four poems in the chapbook anthology.

Today's dual prompts from Poetic Asides and NaPoWriMo: (1)Write a poem about morning, and (2) write an ekphrastic poem (poem inspired by a work of art).  So here are two:

September Morn

“There’s too little morn and too much maid….”

Anthony Comstock

A water nymph, or just a young girl

with no inhibitions, or clothes,

skinny-dipping in a chilly, misty lake?

Chabas worked three years on it,

won a medal, and sent it to America

where it caused a major stir.

Indecent, cried the prudes of the day.

That only made her more popular –

postcards and parodies were everywhere.

Critics declaimed it as “kitsch”,

but almost as a last laugh,

she still hangs in New York’s Met,

where the mist still hangs on the mountain,

she still crouches demurely,

and the water in the lake is still cold.

Self-portrait with Clouds

“The sun poured in like butterscotch

and stuck to all my senses….”

                                                Joni Mitchell

The young woman from Saskatoon

with long, shiny blonde hair,

solemnly holds a red lily

in her left hand,

while the Saskatchewan River  

flows behind her, past the old hotel.

The sky, fiery reds, oranges, yellows –

butterscotch, if you will –

reflects in the waters.

For so many of us, she was the sunrise

on our musical journey –

“Chelsea Morning”, “Both Sides Now” –

and she still enthralls us with songs

on love, the world and its foibles,

proud as her provincial red flower.