From a visitor, I just discovered Six Word Saturdays. based on the book Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six Word Memoirs By Writers Famous And Obscure. Fun. Want to try? Visit Six Word Saturdays at Show My Face.
Here’s mine–
Trees Choose Trimmings: Snow or Lights?
Thanksgiving morning is sewn with crystals
draped on every branch.
Sky wears bright blue
with three puffy pink clouds
tossed casually over the barn roof.
Deer accent the wide field beyond.
The two cardinals are almost gaudy,
their splash of color nearly too much
for such a pilgrim holiday.
Gathering things into piles
we’ll sort tomorrow
is how our lives
grow dusty,
how all the facets
in the diamond of possibility
lose their luster, dim,
and wink out.
An action word
can fool us—
Spinning in circles
is not the same as
climbing the mountain.
Hospitals feel like high school—
waiting rooms filled with people
who have only this in common—
the anxious, the overtired,
the giddy, the lonely, the tattooed,
groomed, tattered, athletic,
and those who only move in herds,
all of them, all of them,
with too much to carry
and their eyes fixed on the door.
The shy boy, who never speaks in class,
raises his hand now, when the subject matters.
How much violence, he wants to know, how
much gore can he include in his novel
of a science experiment gone horribly wrong?
Next to him, the girl doodling flowers
says she hasn’t started yet but
is thinking of a children’s story
about a pony, or possibly a unicorn.
Later, face shining, she stops me in the
crowded hallway to show me ten pages
of scribbled notebook paper.
She says, I’ve changed my mind.
Now, it’s a romance.
The old stars were sunlight once
Movie theater, closed 30 years,
shuttered and dark,
brick and mortar slowly dissolving in time
until just now, when pale November sun
reached across the abandoned parking lot,
and climbed the tall back
where the screen used to be.
For a long dawn moment,
the whole building glowed pink,
warmed and beautiful
in the light of all this attention.
is the skill I’m trying to unlearn.
I work hard at picturing disaster
not stalking us at all, but rather
losing interest, wandering off.
If disaster stumbles into my door,
I want to be surprised.
When I hear that all day
tornadoes swept the Midwest
I add more curry to the soup
to smoke out trouble while
I balance the phone to my ear.
Those high winds
you remind me
are headed straight for us.
My beautiful aunt
with her black hair
and bright red lips
was the one
the rest of the family
told stories about.
She didn’t care.
Laughing at their gossipy ways,
she pulled them close,
told them another story,
kissed their befuddled cheeks.
On my own gray days,
it cheers me to remember those faces,
that flock of dour Scotsmen
surprised at what they made—
one red flower dropped in their midst
thriving in a field of rocks.
there's a poem in every day
aka: The Happy Bookers
Artist
I came to where you were living, up a stair. There was no one there.--John Ashberry, "The New Higher"
custom poems on vintage typewriters
One Poet's Writing Practice: Poems by Mary Kendall
A Ronka Poetry Practice Since 2014
Living in the moment
Puff Of Smoke Poems 