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“Writing a poem…is a kind of possible love affair between something like the heart (that courageous but also shy factory of emotion) and the learned skills of the conscious mind.” Mary Oliver

Poetry, I’m back
and sorry I missed our rendezvous
all these May mornings
forsook you for Twitter
Facebook, email, hotmail

Are you mad?
Feeling jilted?
Regretting all the times
you gave it up for me
during our April trysts?

I guess I needed a break
from our hot-and-heavy
so without telling you
without really knowing
that I was doing it
I stayed away…

But I’m back
feeling lonely, guilty
tentative but resolute
though hesitant
to make glib promises

Can we talk?

© 2013 by Violet Nesdoly

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I know it’s been mighty quiet on here. A break from poetry seems to be the way I recuperate from the April’s National Poetry Month binge of poem-writing. I wrote this poem in May of 2009. It seems history repeats itself this way each year.

I’ve also been busy working on other aspects of writing. In a few weeks I’ll be attending a writer’s conference in Ontario. Somehow getting myself organized for something like that and writing poems doesn’t fit together.

I do have a few new poems online, though, and my own page at VerseWrights. The webmaster there, Carl Sharpe, is most welcoming. So if you’d like to join the VerseWrights poets, why don’t you explore the site and send him an email?

Oh, and one more bit of good news. I entered the 2013 William Henry Drummond Poetry Contest a few weeks ago, and got a lovely email on Mother’s Day, telling me one of the pieces I submitted had won Honourable Mention. “Forest Fire Roundel” will be included in the organization’s 2013 Anthology. (I’ll post it online after the book is published.)

Till next time inspiration hits…

Tulips – La Conner Washington

Skagit Valley Tulip Festival

Red, pink and yellow
on the distant horizon
like a rainbow mirage
beckons flower-hunters.

Textured strips of wine, crimson
magenta, plum, canary
blanket the fields
a crocheted afghan of color.

Packed clay borders
teem with beauty-seekers.
Couples walk hand-in-hand.
Old women push walkers

over the lumpy earth
beside middle-aged daughters
pleased to have given Mom
her springtime outing.

A young mother poses her little girl
in a storybook of princess pink.
The dark-skinned family are chocolate sprinkles
against a confection of yellow.

All the while photographers
tap smart phones and tablets
focus and click pocket-sized digitals
the serious weighted down

with tripods and equipment
peer through their blunt snouts of lenses
into cups and bowls, take with them
images of undersides and private rooms.

In April the fields of La Conner
are awash, a-drift, a-wonder
with spring’s one month miracle—
the resurrection of tulips!

© 2013 by Violet Nesdoly

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This week hubby and I took a mid-week break to go across the line and visit La Conner, Washington, part of the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival. What a thrill for this camera-toting flower-lover.

The collage contains a tiny sample of my photos. (In the days ahead, I’ll be sharing more at my photoblog, promptings 2).

The poem above is so new the ink is still wet on it, which means it is very much a first draft, but I feel like sharing the enjoyment during tulip season. The Skagit Valley Tulip Festival continues to the end of April.

This poem is part of Poetry Friday, hosted today by Laura Salas at Writing the World for Kids.

Loveliest of Trellis, the Chervonets Now

Loveliest of trellis the chervonets now
Is hung with blooper along the boulder
And stands about the woolpack ridicule
Wearing whitleather for easting.

Now of my thresher yeast and tenancy
Twig will not come again.
And take from severalty springer a scorpion
It only leaves me figment more.

And since to look at thinker in blooper
Figment springer are little root
About the woolpack I will go
to see the chervonets hung with snuggery.

V. Nesdoly

My huge apologies to A. E. Housman, who wrote the original

(which I present to you now, along with a tree to match):

Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

A. E. Housman

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National Poetry month made me do it—make a travesty of Mr. Housman’s lovely poem. Actually, it was inspired by the April 10th prompt on the Poets & Writers site:

Write a poem using the N+7 form, conceived of by the French poets of the Oulipo movement. Choose a text and replace each noun in that text with the noun occurring seven entries below it in your dictionary. Next, try the exercise with one of your own poems.

What is the Oulipo movement? According to Wikipedia, Oulipo was short for a French phrase roughly translated “Workshop of potential literature.” The movement consisted of a group of French-speaking writers and mathematicians who sought to create literary works using constrained writing techniques.

Some other Oulipo constraints:

Snowball
A poem in which each line is a single word, and each successive word is one letter longer.

Lipogram
Writing that excludes one or more letters. The previous sentence is a lipogram in B, F, H, J, K, Q, V, Y, and Z (it does not contain any of those letters).

Prisoner’s constraint, also called Macao constraint
A type of lipogram that omits letters with ascenders and descenders (b, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, p, q, t, and y).

Palindromes
Sonnets and other poems constructed using palindromic techniques.

Univocalism
A poem using only one vowel, although the vowel may be used in any of its aural forms. For example, “born” and “cot” could both be used in a univocalism, but “sue” and “beau” could not.

This post is submitted to Poetry Friday, hosted today by Irene Latham at Live Your Poem where you will find a  wealth of wonderful, proper, and no doubt some more silly poems too.

My mother with her newborn granddaughter, my daughter

BABY SHOWER

I sit in a circle of women,
exclaiming over sleepers, booties and bibs,
careful not to startle
the porcelain doll –
soft unaccustomed weight in my arms.
I glimpse, across the circle, my baby
almost 17 and beautiful
laughing with her friends.

© 2004 by V. Nesdoly

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Happy Birthday to my beautiful daughter! Just before she was born, my husband got a Bible promise for her life from Luke 1:14—the angel’s words to Zechariah about John: “(S)he will be a joy and delight to you, and many will rejoice because of his (her) birth” (NIV).  That has proven true over and over!

I well remember becoming a mom for the first time (she was my firstborn). What an experience—an initiation into a season of life which never ends. Once a mom, always a mom, and I love being a mother and now a grandmother.

I wrote the poem above around the year 2000. It was first published in my 2004 chapbook Calendar.

i
waiting for the play to begin
the impossible uprooting
done

here on the ground
what’s between us can’t be heard
weather of the heart

enigma from the stone
earth against your cheek
polishing the petoskey stone.

ii

ii
slow train passing
weaving the wind
open the door to another realm

duet for wings and earth
a deed to the light
a trail of light

the ordering of love
the kisses of his mouth
midnight in the garden

iii

iii
god of missed connections
a breath of light
breathing fire

rattlesnake plantain
animals of my own kind
let me out!

love, laughter and tears
the unfolding of the soul
I am the poem

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I’ve never tried putting together a spine poem so I decided to make that my poem-a-day yesterday. It was fun but more challenging than I thought. Already I’d like to be rearranging some of these lines!

Spring is truly on its way where I live—something that makes poem-writing in April a lot easier. This is one of my poem-a-day efforts from this week along with the scene that inspired it.

This post is submitted to Poetry Friday, hosted this week by  Diane Mayr at Random Noodling.

Taking  things to which you never gave a thought
things you never thought you’d lose …

Reach, hug, walk
read, write, talk

Only blurry memories now
your mute self

Kept captive, confused within your betrayal of a body
awaiting prognosis of the next

Electrocardiogram, CT, MRI
lab report, doctor, therapist

© 2013 by Violet Nesdoly

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Thanks to the encouragement of Catherine and Joy in my Poetry Friday comments, I’ve decided to post some of my Poem-A-Day efforts. This is my April 6th one.

Though I often use prompts to write these daily poems, I like it best when poems arise out of my day to day living. I got the idea for this acrostic poem while thinking about my husband’s uncle and aunt, who have had cerebrovascular accidents (strokes) in the last while.

Tansy buds

Blooming

Some poems write themselves
with the ease of flowers
opening in time-lapse photography.

Others leave me in a litter
of scribbled pages, green petals
ripped from a hard bud.

© 2013 by Violet Nesdoly

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Are you doing a poem-a-day writing challenge during April (in honor of National Poetry Month)? I am, though I don’t have the courage to post my efforts early in the process.

Yesterday the idea I got from one of my prompt sources was irresistible but when I started writing, nothing came together. Hours later I had only a 3 stanza piece typed into my computer ending with a note to myself: “This doesn’t feel finished” along with a stack of scribbled and crossed-out false starts.

Or maybe they aren’t false starts. Maybe, as the ditty above (that came to me this morning with complete ease) would suggest, the poem I was trying to write needs a little time to ripen and those attempts were its way of telling me that.

This poem is submitted to Poetry Friday, hosted today by Robyn Hood Black at Life on the Deckle Edge.

Judas – Artist unknown

Betrayer

I never fit with the eleven.
Fishermen, tax collector, even the Carpenter
lack my calculating mind.

Obviously now a push is needed
to make Him show Himself
for who He is.

The others will thank me
from their places by the throne
even the J. brothers—

getting their mother
to ask for left and right!
—how laughable.

Heavy bag
will soon be heavier still
this night

I alone have courage
to take their destinies
into my hands.

© 2013 by Violet Nesdoly

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Today is Good Friday, the day Christians all over the world commemorate the death of Christ. The story includes one of Jesus’ disciples—Judas— betraying Him to the Romans with a kiss in exchange for 30 pieces of silver from the chief priests and scribes.

The Bible gives us this chilling explanation of why he did this: “Then Satan entered Judas…” (Luke 22:3).  How he rationalized his actions and what  he hoped he would get out of it is not told us. “Betrayal” is one scenario I’ve imagined.

This poem is part of Poetry Friday, hosted today by Mary Lee Hahn at A Year of Reading

“…branches arc…”

Houston Trail – Langley BC

Peacock ferns, prehistoric, lush
draw us into the dim, cedar-canopied wood.
Uprooted trunks sprawl, branches arc,
snapped limbs leap in frozen pirouettes.
Slim apparitions forever grope, reach, grasp
a menagerie of many-appendaged moon monsters
sculpted from dripping filigree
and moss macramé.

Victim of the spell
in Mother’s warning:
“If you frown like that
your face will stay that way,”
the forest’s pose is fixed.
But time has softened the arboreal grimace
muffled the keening of the wind
with hangings of verdant chenille,
knitted blankets, sweaters,
hats and gloves of lime angora
for the slumbering
arms, stumps and claws.

© 2004 – Violet Nesdoly

“…apparitions forever grope, reach, grasp…”

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I live near rainforest. Some of my favorite walks are through woods beside the Fraser River. I’ll never forget the first time I walked the Houston Trail—a loop walk through the most mossy woods I’ve ever seen. It looked like a forest minefield draped in green. The poem above is my memory of that walk.

On Sunday I walked another trail near that one and again moss was everywhere. I wrote the poem some years ago. I took the photos on Sunday.

This poem is part of Poetry Friday, hosted today by Greg at GottaBook