Prompt: They say it’s your birthday. Write a birthday poem as if it is or write a poem in honor of someone who celebrates a birthday today, January 9. This poem celebrates Joan Baez, born this day in 1941.

Your voice, those songs

Who gave me the albums?
I played them until their vinyl was scratched and worn,
staccato pops punctuating soprano vocals.
My adolescent soprano mimicking yours,
singing, swaying, even sobbing once
in a while.

Plane Wreck at Los Gatos
There but for Fortune
All My Trials

Tales spinning as each record spun –
Worlds imagined, yet unimaginable.

What I didn’t know then of trials
I would learn – someday soon.

The prompt, simplified: Close your eyes and listen to music that has no words. Note what images come to your mind as you let your thoughts wander to various places and times. Write down these images once you finish listening and use them in a poem. If you’d like, start the poem with the line, I am skimming the edges…from Kelli Russell Agodon’s poem, “Yakima Ferry at Sunset.”

I am skimming the edges
of Central Park,
early summer oasis of green
with a sheen of dust,
the fringe between civilization
and wilderness.
The steady city rhythm
compelling, propelling, insistent. Then
a gradual irregularity, regularly irregular,
interrupts the everyday stop, start, repeat.
A question, a disruption, an incident, a demand.
Still –
the rhythm goes on beneath,
strong and steady.
The city moves on and, after holding
my breath for just a moment,
so do I.

Written after listening to “Take Five” by the Dave Brubeck Quartet

This prompt became a melancholy meditation today when twelve people were assassinated in or near the offices of the French satirical newspaper, Charlie Hebdo. The prompt: start with the image of a stone and add at least five of the following words to the poem: kamikaze, landslide, spill, bridge, vaccine, read, red, hollow, mismatch, tilt, freeway, pillow, harmonica, fairy shrimp. So many happier possibilities, but once I started, this is where it went:

Skipping stones –
a game the French call “Ricochet.”
And I discover this today, of all days.
A day when blood spills red in Paris streets.
A day when we read the names of the dead.
A day when our world tilts again toward madness.
And in the hollow silence, an echo of

Ricochet

On most Tuesdays, Margo Roby provides a prompt on her blog. I haven’t participated in a while, but I hope to use her prompts for my small stone project in January and maybe beyond. Today, she’s suggesting a poem about where you were when an unforgettable event occurred. I would have written about JFK’s assassination or the Challenger disaster, or even 9/11, but I decided a small stone was better suited to a smaller event.

A bathroom remodel
Another Friday morning wandering
the aisles at Lowe’s.
“A commode is just a commode, isn’t it?”
But a vanity? Something important,
or at the very least, full of self-respect.

Tile
Too many options, too many price points. And then-
What’s the cost of labor?
Who will give us advice?

The insistent ring, the fumble with the purse.

“Already? In the hospital already?’
A grandson on the way, a little
early. 

Right then, of course, no one cared what else awaited
remodeling.

The prompt simplified: List all the coldest words you can think of and then use the most interesting ones in a poem about summer or a warm weather activity.

Lying on the beach, approaching sleep –
Beneath closed eyes,
whiteness surrounds me.
Glacial stillness of icy nights
frozen in my dreams.

The prompt, simplified: Write down 15 words you’ve never used in a poem and write a poem using at least 10 of them. Since I’ve written so very few poems to begin with, this prompt seemed ridiculous to me. But it did start me thinking about the word “censor” and associated homophones.

not censorship
but sense, making
sense of the senses,
making the sensory sensual
stirring sensibilities
uncensored

The prompt simplified: “Write about something you want to protect…If this is a first person poem, allow the speaker to be vulnerable.”

Of course, after rounding up and rejecting the usual suspects: grandchildren, ground water, penguins, the environment, I recognized that this vulnerable “first person” wants most to protect her self-esteem. And then a wonderful thing happened! I once again came across Neil Gaiman’s New Year’s wish to all of us this year. It’s here in its entirety:

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/search/label/Happy%20New%20Year

Let me also quote a few lines:

So that’s my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody’s ever made before. Don’t freeze, don’t stop, don’t worry that it isn’t good enough, or it isn’t perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life.

Whatever it is you’re scared of doing, Do it.

A poem may be added here later – or maybe not, but the prompt was well-served anyway.

Cheers!

For the Tuesday prompt, Margo asked us to select one of the labors assigned to Hercules and to create a poem related to that specific task. The one that spoke to me was #11. The Apples of the Hesperides. I decided to write a found poem from the information on the Hesperides contained in the website theoi.com/Titan/Hesperides.html

Golden

Purest flame of fire.
golden light of sunset.
Goddesses of the evening,
The power of a song.

Light-bringing radiance.
Tree of golden apples –
source of brilliant sunsets.
Treasures of the gods.

Margo’s prompt for today: Take a familiar walk with “new eyes” and look for something unexpected about which to write.

Colors

The house on the hill grew shabby in time,
Shrinking from view (although few even looked)
Merging into the landscape,
a sad aura of brown and gold.

The”For Sale” sign in place for weeks,
its red the only color there.
The house was sold for, no surprise,
well below the asking price.

Now fall arrives – its browns and golds
still camouflage the little house.
Yet – in the front yard, a renewal.
Brick red Adirondack chairs and
a child’s new swing, bright blue ropes
hung from a massive oak.