PAD Challenge: Warming Up III

 And two more before the official start of National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo):

T-minus 2: Write a poem with the title "Almost _______ ."

Almost There
 
In his dream - or is it a nightmare? -
he is taking the kids on vacation,
when about halfway to their destination
they begin to ask, "Are we there yet?"
"Not yet," he replies.
 
Then they cover another fourth
of the distance to their objective.
"Are we there yet?"
"Not yet."
Another eighth of the total miles:
"Are we there yet?"
"Almost there."
 
You can see where this is going.
Like Sisyphus, this poor dad
will never accomplish his goal -
another sixteenth, another thirty-second,
always getting nearer on a long curve
that approaches, but never quite reaches,
the little town of Asymptote.

T-minus 1: Write a "warmup" poem.  I also used the head-start prompt from Maureen Thorson's NaPoWriMo blog: take an image from any work of art on the Metropolitan Museum of Art website and write a poem based on it. I thought of "warming up" in a musician's sense so I looked for examples with instruments. Still Life: Violin and Music by William Michael Hartnett, which I have seen in person in the museum, has always struck me with its realism, but I took a deeper dive into its details and came up with this poem. (I may eventually try to turn it into a sonnet.)

Warming Up
 
Last week a wedding and this week a wake -
his fiddle hangs by a string from the door.
It's been a trusted friend through it all -
the varnish worn thin around its bridge.
 
It doesn't matter how I feel, he thinks,
I need to warm up. So he takes it down,
and the flute, for he's handy with it as well,
and the dog-eared music, a plaintive ballad
about a lover's death, which some call
"Saint Kevin."  He rosins his bow and begins.
 
The words sing in his head:
By that lake whose gloomy shore...
Soon the cold in the strings has gone,
as the banked fire in his kitchen
keeps out the chilly March air.

Here's the painting:

PAD Challenge: Warming Up II

 Here are three more poems I wrote as part of Robert Brewer's "countdown" to the annual April Poem-a-day Challenge:

T-minus 9: Write a "cause-and-effect" poem. I also used this week's word bank from the Sunday Whirl blog. The words were hope, water, inhumane, suppress, spring, wait, line, evil, soul, shame, race, vote. The words were obviously taken from a source that talked about the recent draconic voting bill passed by the GOP-controlled legislature in Georgia, which even makes it illegal to give out food and water to voters standing in long waiting lines, which will become routine with the restrictions that will go into effect. 

Thirst
 
It's now illegal in Georgia to give food and water to voters in line. - CNN
 
Hope is like water.
We all need it to survive,
and to deny it only makes us
thirstier. Inhumanely, you
suppress the flow of a spring,
but it will only keep bubbling up.
 
They wait patiently in line to drink.
There was an evil time not so long ago
where they could not even quench
their thirst where they wanted.
But their souls would not be broken.
And they will not now either.
 
You have not shamed their race;
you have only made them stronger,
and today they will march
to the voting booth, despite what you do
to stop them, and they will drink
from the clear fountain of freedom.

T-minus 4: Write a "universal" poem.

42
 
In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,
the supercomputer Deep Thought
is asked to ponder the question of
"life, the universe, and everything."
 
After eons of considered logic and reasoning,
it declares that the answer to that question is
"forty-two."
 
Forty-two also happened to be
the jersey number of Jackie Robinson,
whose place in history need not be explained here.
Suffice to say that now, every year,
every major league ballplayer wears
that otherwise-retired number on their jerseys
on Jackie Robinson Day.
 
What does baseball have to do
with life and the universe?
Well... everything.

T-minus 3: Write a "spirit of the stairs" poem. As Robert explains it, "...that moment when you come up with all the things you feel you should've said AFTER the moment has passed. Hence, you're on the stairs." So I kept it simple with a senryu:

what I should have said
echoes like a cruel spirit
in the stairwell

PAD Challenge 2021: Warming Up

 It's almost that time! On April 1st I begin my annual marathon of thirty or more poems in thirty days, my most productive time of the year, with the help of daily prompts from Robert Brewer's blog "Write Better Poetry" (formerly Poetic Asides) on the Writers Digest website, and Maureen Thorson's NaPoWriMo blog. But this year, Robert is doing his annual "countdown" to the Poem-a-day (PAD) Challenge by offering daily prompts for the ten days leading up to the 1st. Last year I didn't join in early, but this year I did - I haven't written to every daily prompt so far, but I'll share what I have done.

"Countdown T-Minus 10": Write a poem with the title "Let's ___________." Here is a quatern, a poem of four quatrains, with eight syllables in each line, where the first of the first stanza is repeated as the second, third, and fourth line respectively in each subsequent stanza, creating a kind of refrain. I won one of Robert's Poetic Form Challenges a few years ago with a poem in this form.                                                   

Let's Get This Over With

Enough. Let's get this over with.
I've had my fill of silly masks
and sanitizers, six-foot space
and groceries brought by Instacart.
 
Our kids have been screen-schooled for long
enough. Let's get this over with
more shots in arms, let's get immune,
let's listen to the science, folks.
 
Let's open up the failing shops
and businesses, who've suffered quite
enough. Let's get this over with
some common sense, and caution too.
 
But let's not party yet - we may
be done with it, but it's not done
with us. Let's end this plague. Enough's
enough. Let's get this over with.

"Countdown T-minus 8": Write a "fantasy" poem. With the recent horrific mass shootings in Atlanta and Boulder, Colorado, this was on my mind, and I wrote a triolet (a French form with repeated lines) in response. 

Alternate Reality

In my world without any guns
more folks could get on with their lives.
There still may be some violent ones
in my world. Without any guns,
though, we'd  have more daughters and sons.
Maybe fights, but each side survives
in my world. Without any guns,
more folks would escape with their lives.

"Countdown T-minus 7": Write an altered song title poem; that is, take the title of a song, change a word in it, and write a poem based on it. I took it a step further and wrote a song parody based on a well-known miscontrued lyric, and also "based on a true story."

Bathroom Rising
(from the famous Creedence Clearwater Revival misconstrued lyric)
 
I see a bathroom arising,
I see relief is on the way.
I need to pee so bad it's fright'ning,
I've had a real bad time today.
 
I won't go out tonight,
It's killed my social life -
There's a bathroom on the right.
 
Sometimes the stream just isn't flowiin',
Sometimes I need to go too soon.
Sometimes my desperation's showin',
These potty breaks will be my ruin.
 
I won't go out tonight,
It's killed my social life -
There's a bathroom on the right.
 
I wish I'd get it all together,
I'm so embarrassed I could die.
This BPH ain't getting better,
You might just think it's TMI.
 
I won't go out tonight,
It's killed my social life -
There's a bathroom on the right.
 
I won't go out tonight,
It's killed my social life -
There's a bathroom on the right.

"Countdown T-minus 6": Write a "McGuffin" poem. A McGuffin is, as Robert defines it, "an object (living or nonliving) that is necessary for the plot but has no greater value to the story."  I also followed Robert's lead by writing, as he did, a "golden shovel" poem - a poem that uses a line or more from another's poet's work, using each word in order from that line as the last word in each of the new poem's lines. The form was created by poet Terrance Hayes, inspired by Gwendolyn Brooks' famous poem "We Real Cool" (subtitled "The Pool Players. Seven at the Golden Shovel.") My inspiration was a haiku by Katsushiku Hokusai:

I write, erase, rewrite
erase again, and then
a poppy blooms

The golden shovel does not have to reflect the subject or theme of the original poem, but I decided to go in that direction, expanding, you might say, on Hokusai's idea.

McGuffin
(golden shovel of a haiku by Katushika Hokusai)
 
looking for a seedling, I
stumble over a shovel, and write
about it, then change my mind, erase
the entire thing, then rewrite
 
something about a wheelbarrow, erase
that whole stolen image, and start again
with a fresh sheet of paper and
a new pen, then
 
wander my garden, freshly turned, ready for a
blossoming, and I think of a bright red poppy
or better yet, zinnias, their Technicolor blooms

(Check back soon for more daily poems!)