NaPoWriMo Day #9

And we have arrived at day nine.

I picked up another book of poetry yesterday that I hope to add to my reading list for this month.  The 100 Best-Loved Poems by Dover Thrift Editions.  I read a bit on it, so far it's mostly classic poetry...but I'm not complaining!

The prompt over at NaPoWriMo today went something like this:  I challenge you to write a visual poem

As I sat thinking about this....my thoughts were all over the place.  Everything is visual, right?

But then I started thinking in specifics, about visuals (in various forms) that had been prominent memories, moments, derivatives of my personal, inner, writer's world.  And that brought me to the memory of all the art that always hung (and still does hang) on my mother's walls.  They range from Victorian parties to grand balls, to beautiful old chateaus by the sea.  Several pictures of the sea, actually, and those were always my favorite!

So that's sort of what this poem is about:  myself as a child, enjoying the scenery in one of those framed pieces:

Sheetrock Walls and Grecian Shores

Always, for as long as I could remember,

A picture hang above my bed,

An acrylic visual for the sounds 

of a calm gulf, the gulls, and laughter 

of toes first touching the tropic.

Though the sounds had all been silenced

By the dusty trick of time, of real life

Running through elbows and ankles,

Almost the way an unsuspecting

Wave does, chilling your bones

As you shiver, unaware

For the sun in your hair, the shells

Of the beach distinctly shining

Against the sky like ship-wrecked

Loot, long ago discarded

By an angry storm, rough waves

Splitting pirate masts, those drowning

Martyrs of the ocean water.

When I was a kid and life

Got to be too much with its lengthy

Test scores, or the long, brittle

Battle of my parent’s marriage,

I’d lay backwards on my bed,

Feet propped against the headboard

And will myself into this

World beyond sheetrock and wall.

I’d bask, face turned upward,

In the blue horizon, light as helium,

My fingers lifted skyward, faced cooled

By the receding end of a sharp wave.

I’d spy the clapboard shimmies,

Quaint-brick structures shining

Behind moss among the cliffs

Like ancient, miniature chateaus.

I’d make my way to the salt-dusted

Windows of each one,

Noting the bored children too busy

Wishing for the shiny paint of a new toy,

The lover-less mothers who wrote empty

Letters to men who’d left the country

In a language that abhorred the sea

While their old-lady mothers stirred soup

Atop  centuries-old stoves,  gray rock

Of each surface burned smooth

by so many years of use,

all those evenings spent boiling

broth for the tangy, sweet Gelato,

trademark of their ancestral roots,

And I could almost feel the contour

as it swam my tongue.