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.
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