PAD Challenge Day 15: God Moving the Furniture

First, I want to mention that my poem, "Public Apology", is featured today on the website Your Daily Poem. Thanks for Jayne Jaudon Ferrer for selecting it. (If you don't visit the site today, you can find my poem archived for April 15th.)

Today's prompts from Write Better Poetry and NaPoWriMo: (1) Write a poem with the title "________ Story", and (2) "...think about a small habit you picked up from one of your parents, and then to write a piece that explores an early memory of your parent engaged in that habit, before shifting into writing about yourself engaging in the same habit."  So here we go:

Storm Story
 
When I was little, my mother would tell me
that the thunder in the sky was God
moving the furniture, or the angels bowling.
She hoped this would assuage my fear,
but I couldn't ignore her body language,
especially during an evening storm,
when she'd pace the halls and rooms of our house
in her nightgown like a restless ghost,
smoke trailing behind her from another cigarette.
 
When I was a little older I wanted to be
a meteorologist. The hows and whys of weather
fascinated me, and I documented their changes
with my amateur weather station. I could estimate
the distance of a lightning bolt by the number
of seconds between its flash and boom.
Still, I inherited my mother's fear of thunderstorms.
 
If I were a dog, I'd hide under the bed whimpering
whenever thunder crashes overhead.
I can't sleep through storms at night.

And like a dog, I have a kind of sixth sense -

at the slightest distant rumble or faint flash,
I'm awake, turning on the lights and pacing
through the house, just like my mother.
But I've never smoked.

PAD Challenge Day 14: A Little Family History?

 Today's prompts from Write Better Poetry and NaPoWriMo: (1) Write a "from where I'm sitting" poem (i.e., include only things you can see from where you're writing), and (2) write a poem about the meaning or origin of your first or last name. These two prompts seem to conflict a bit, and my poem does concentrate more on the second one, but I was able to at least include something from my immediate surroundings at the end of the poem.

Niedt
 
The origins of my name are murky,
but they are German, for sure.
There's a town called Nied in Hessen,
so my family may have come from there.
There's also the middle German word "niet"
which means enthusiastic, eager, zealous.
That doesn't exactly describe my personality -
I'm no cheerleader, no firebrand,
though occasionally something may excite me.
 
My family came here in the late 1800's,
and some of our story has been lost
after generations, but there is this apocryphal tale
of an ancestor of noble birth, who one day
decided to run away with the downstairs maid,
leaving his title and fortune behind.
What a romantic story, you may say,
or what a fool for love. He must have been eager
or enthusiastic, even zealous, to walk away
from all that privilege and power for someone
so dear to his heart.
 
I didn't have to make that choice. The love of my life
sits upstairs working from home, not in a castle
but a humble three-bedroom Cape Cod,
while I try to tell my story at this computer,
with loads of laundry looming to my right. 

PAD Challenge Day 13: Limerick News

 Today's prompts from Write Better Poetry and NaPoWriMo: (1) Write a "lucky" and/or "unlucky" poem, and (2) "write a poem in the form of a news article you wish would come out tomorrow." This isn't actually in news-item form (maybe it would be if Edward Lear had been a newspaper man), and it's short and sweet. Maybe I'll come up with something more substantial later, but for now:

Lucky Day

In other news, COVID is done,
world peace prevails, we've banned the gun,
all the poor have been fed,
all the despots are dead,
and my lottery ticket just won!

PAD Day 12: Beethoven and Disney in Outer Space

Before I start, let me mention my poetic buddy Vince Gotera, who also does the poem-a-day challenge every April and takes his prompts from the same two blogs as I do. That's actually how we met, trading compliments for each others' poetry one April several years ago. He's given me a couple of shout-outs this month, so I owe him at least one. His blog is The Man with the Blue Guitar, and it's well worth a visit. He shares it with his poet friend Thomas Alan Holmes. Go and read their daily poem posts - you won't regret it. 

Today's prompts are kind of similar in they are both word prompts, in a way. Write Better Poetry says to use the following words in a poem: great, play, season, race, convict, voice. NaPoWriMo invites us to review two reference sources - Lempriere's Classical Dictionary and The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, then take at least one word, concept or idea from each one and work them into a poem. 

Lempriere's reference book is over 800 pages long, full of detailed mythological references, and its scanned PDF copy is not easy to read, especially since it appears to be the original 1812 edition, complete with archaic typeface, like the s's that look like lower-case f's. What I did was pick a random page (427, the month and day of my upcoming birthday) and found something interesting to use. It's a  tale I hadn't heard before, about a war which started at a wedding, between centaurs and a race of people called the Lapiths. The science fiction dictionary is considerably shorter, listing terms from various science fiction works and the year they were coined. I picked page 27 at random and found the most fascinating term on the page to be "space tan: a tan caused by being in space, exposed to the light of suns unfiltered by planetary atmospheres." So how do I work six random words, plus a Roman myth and a science fiction term, into one poem? Not easily....

Beethoven and Disney in Outer Space

 
Listening to Beethoven's great Pastoral Symphony,
I can't help thinking of the cartoon from Fantasia,
that bucolic romp of mythical characters to the music,
centaurs and unicorns, cherubs and satyrs,
and fat drunken Bacchus, sloshing wine all about,
as they celebrate the spring season, playing and cavorting
till Jupiter crashes the party with a fistful of lightning bolts.
Life wasn't always idyllic for the centaurs, though.
They raised a ruckus after too much wine
at a wedding, which quickly became a small war
with the Lapiths, an altercation they say was incited
by Mars, pissed off that he wasn't invited.
All this rolls around in my head as we pass angry Mars,
racing on our way beyond majestic Jupiter, and from there
heading with conviction toward Alpha Centauri,
our next-nearest star, and its habitable planet.
We are space-tanned and ready to be a new voice
in the universe, challenging the gods.

PAD Challenge Day 11: The First G(r)eek Fan Letter?

 Today's prompts from Write Better Poetry and NaPoWriMo: (1) Write a poem that incorporates one or more prime numbers, and (2) write a one-stanza poem in the form of a letter to someone famous (real or fictional) or to yourself, and a one-stanza response.

I started thinking about prime numbers and looked for who might have discovered them. Though that discovery seems lost in antiquity (there is evidence the ancient Egyptians fiddled with them), the ancient Greek polymath Eratosthenes (er-a-TOS-the-neez) of Cyrene (an area now part of Libya), who lived in the 3rd Century B.C., is credited with devising a method for finding them in a sequence of numbers. It's called the Sieve of Eratosthenes, and it's basically a numbered grid that is ten cells wide and as long as you want to make it. By crossing out or eliminating all the non-prime, or composite, numbers on the grid (by multiplying by 2, 3, 5, 7, etc.), the cells that are left are the prime numbers. In other words, they "fall through the sieve." Here's an animated example of how it works. Eratosthenes is actually most well known as the first person to accurately estimate the circumference of the Earth. I imagined a letter to him from an appreciative "fan" and his response. I was thinking of the clerihew verse form (a four-line humorous rhyming poem about a famous person that begins with their name), although this probably isn't technically a clerihew. Also, note that the year in the title is a prime number.

Fan Letter, 223 B.C.
 
Eratosthenes, you are so smart -
this letter comes straight from the heart.
It's amazing, I think, that you give
us prime numbers that fall through your sieve.
 
Well, thanks! You know, chances were teeny
that your letter'd reach me in Cyrene.
Now excuse me while I prove my worth
by measuring the girth of the Earth.

PAD Challenge Day 10: Peace, Love, and the Junk Drawer

 Today's prompts from Write Better Poetry is to write a poem with the title "Get _________." NaPoWriMo's prompt is more challenging, but  it's basically this: (1) Find a favorite song, listen to it, and take notes on your impressions are you are listening. (2) Rummage through a "junk drawer" in your house (we all have them) and look at or discover the objects, and take notes during that process. (3) Combine the two sets of notes you made and write a poem. 

I admit I didn't do a "deep dive" into that exercise, which seems to want to elicit a stream-of-consciousness response. Instead, I kept thinking about the old song "Get Together" by the Youngbloods, then listened to it a couple of times and reviewed the lyrics, then went through one of several "junk drawers" in my house. This is my result, for what it's worth.

Get Together

You hold the key to love and fear
All in your trembling hands....
- Jesse Colin Young
 
Rummaging through the junk drawer
in my desk for a pair of scissors,
I hear the radio in the background playing
that old Sixties tune by the Youngbloods -
 
how we're a moment's sunlight
fading in the grass,
how we can make the mountains sing
and the angels cry ,
that we need to love one another,
 
and so on.
Still rooting through that jumbled drawer,
I find rubber bands, staples, paper clips, glue -
all things that bind and fasten, but nothing
that cuts apart. I'm back to that song again -
 
a naive sentiment, some may say,
left over from the "hippie" era,
but one we need to resurrect for our own sakes,
before the darkness, darkness takes over.
 
I smile at my drawer full of metaphors
and think,
I still need to find those scissors.

PAD Challenge Day 9: An Old Car's Agenda

 First of all, let me thank Maureen Thorson of NaPoWriMo for featuring my blog and my poem from yesterday on her site. It was a very personal poem for me, and I appreciate it being honored in such a way. Thanks, Maureen!

Today's prompts from Write Better Poetry and NaPoWriMo: (1) Write a persona poem from the point of view of an inanimate object, and (2) make a to-do list of an unusual person or character. These two prompts seem to fit together perfectly, so here goes. This was partly inspired by the fact that I currrently own three cars with a combined mileage of about 500,000 miles. 

Old Car's To-do List
 
1. Take at least three cranks before I turn over this morning.
2. Cough a plume of gray smoke upon starting.
3. Lurch out of the driveway, and hesitate a bit when put in drive
(to make him think my trans needs service).
4. If it's raining, streak the windshield with worn-out wipers,
and fishtail a bit to remind him I need new tires.
5. Frustrate him when he forgets my CD player no longer works.
6. Squeak my brakes at random times.
7. Let him stow his groceries in my trunk, but take at least
two tries for my latch to catch.

8. Roll my odometer over to 130,000 - milestone, baby!
9. New glitch: my right turn signal doesn't work.
10. Stall at a stop sign halfway home.
11. Let him regard my fading paint job.

12. Remind him that he's not quite ready to afford a new car.
13. Nudge him to create a metaphor of me as his aging body,
and help him write the poem.