Epitaph

I have on a mask in order to write my last words,
and they are just for you
Anne Sexton



I have almost nothing left to say;
few thoughts dash themselves
against the unseen rocky shores
of my own disquietude –

Every word of my life, I bequeath
to you, and all that I have ever been
I lay at your feet to grow or die;
Abandon me to solitude –


Day 30 ~ EPITAPH

Anmol is our host in The Imaginary Garden on the final day of April.

It has been an awesome month of prompts and poetry, and I believe that my own writing has gone through a renewal process. I am so grateful for all the support of my fellow toads and friends, and for the immeasurable sources of inspiration without which many of these poems would not have been written. Having said that, I will definitely be taking some time off to reflect  and edit my work.

Questioning Reality

She says, “I am content when wakened birds, 
Before they fly, test the reality 
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings”
Wallace Stevens



I do have questions
but none I wish to ask,
except: How will you
remember me
at journey’s end?
But that one
does not have an exact
answer, does it?
It depends on
what you remember
of me now, and will you
think of me at all
in time to come?
So I do not ask
of you a single thing,
just of myself:
How will I
remember you?


Day 29 ~ JOURNEY

Bjorn is our host in The Imaginary Garden today, Asking Questions.

The Substance

All day I’ve built
a lifetime and now
the sun sinks to
undo it.
Anne Sexton

Source

The house is empty
falling to ruin quietly
shutters parting from their hinges
paint unpeeling and tiny jaws
chewing the basement wood.
A silent cat seeks shelter
from the cold wind
and curls in a dank corner.
This is the decay
of a lifetime founded
on the substance of dreams.
Threadbare as the bedsheets
pegged out on the washline,
I wonder if the night will bring rain.


Day 28 ~ SUBSTANCE

Margaret is our host in The Imaginary Garden today, inviting us to reimagine photographic images.

The Toll

Parting is all we know of Heaven
And all we need of Hell.
Emily Dickinson



They deconstruct trees to reconstruct spires
in another derivative Eden

and reroute the icebergs of Niflheim
to perpetuate a single season.

The River Styx they’ve polluted;
Lethe they drained away

and Heaven, the Magic Kingdom
has a cruel toll to pay.


Day 27 ~ CRUEL

Toni is our host in The Imaginary Garden today, asking for Ezra Pound couplets and contrasting images. I have strayed (once again) from the precise instructions.

Suckling Grief

First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go – 
Emily Dickinson



How is it that I find myself,
again, suckling grief
in my latter years
when I had thought to lay
this stillborn child
in its grave long since,
resigned to loss?

Sorrow will not pass away.
It niggles, demanding
I attend to its fresh tears,
jars me awake
with persistent whines, bids me
lay it to my breast
and let it feed.


Day 26 ~ GRIEF

Karin is our host in The Imaginary Garden today, inviting us to Reboot, Rewind, Recycle, Rebirth

The Rain Has Liberty

The Sea and it's Raining. I Missed You So Much
Wura-Natasha Ogunji
 33rd Bienal de São Paulo

Kenia Santos
Used with Permission

The grass bends its back in the stillness of the rain
in its endless falling, the yellow grass

leaning away from the wind in endless yellow rows
like soldiers marching through mud, and dying

but behind the fallen, are ranks and ranks
of the living, golden in youth but dying too.

And the rain has liberty; and the mountains
open their mouths and drink; and the grass

is heavy with seed; and this is the way of things
because the dead are always with us

we march in time in our ranks to the grave
where the yellow grass grows tall in the rain.



Day 25 ~ LIBERTY

I am hosting in The Imaginary Garden today, speaking about Imagism and further inspired by the Contemporary Art of Wura-Natasha Ogunji (Photo shared by Kenia Santos)

More Natural ~ Sonnet 43

Loving me with my shoes off 
means loving my long brown legs 
Anne Sexton



What could be more natural
                                     than the bend of my knee
                    And the glide of your palm
                                     from my ankle to tender thigh?

And lips that pray to flesh
                                     as a thing of divinity?
                My throat was made
                                    for the simple bliss of a sigh,

Your eyes, for the sole purpose
                                    of my gracious nudity.
                 For the pulse beneath my skin
                                   and the rivers that run within.

Oh, Love, that you may know my nature thus!
That I may know the wonder of this perfect trust.



Day 24 ~ A Shakespearean Sonnet

Sherry is our host in The Imaginary Garden today, asking us to describe a Natural Wonder.

There is no one but you ~ Sonnet 42

Good night, good rest. Ah! neither be my share; 
She bade good night, that kept my rest away 
William Shakespeare



There is no one but you:
these are the deserted hours
of night’s close chambers
where the past cannot find you

and the dread of tomorrow
slides into the abyss
of Charon’s tomb
only you, waiting on the brink

between loneliness and sleep,
waiting for my touch
upon your bare skin
to untangle the knots of your body.

Like a fragment of a dream made whole,
I will love you in the darkness of soul.


Day 23 and Day 24: SHAKESPEARE ~ I am commemorating the birth and death of the bard with a sonnet.

Sanaa is our host in The Imaginary Garden today, asking us to share Ghost Story.

Valediction

And reaching up my hand to try,
I screamed to feel it touch the sky.
I screamed, and—lo!—Infinity—
Came down and settled over me
Edna St Vincent Millay

for Shay

Farewell, I said, to the fallen tree,
I said to the sky, Don’t cry –
We’d been together for many a year,
Tall tree, blue sky and me –

Good fortune brought us together,
Scribbling poems of leaf and wing –
Let’s sing today our final song,
Farewell dear, for the long forever –

Day 22 ~ FORTUNE

Shay is singing her swansong in The Imaginary Garden Today. There is NO Substitute!

Hreindýr

And once more I remember that the beginning
is broken.
W.S. Merwin

Flame Keeper
Jason Limberg
Used with Permission

You made a promise,
the kind that tastes of blood and salt
when spoken:
‘I will always be here.’
and thus you remain
as if rooted
while the years and seasons
wrap themselves around you
and branches grow
from your skull
always bare
always heavy
as the thoughts
which burn trails
set your nerves alight
and the night moths flutter
like snowflakes
of sorrow from your eyes.
‘I will always be here.’
Words unspoken:
Only your crown of bone branches
and a promise remains.


Day 21 ~ PROMISE

Kim is our host in The Imaginary Garden today, asking us to delve into the mysteries of Tree Mythology.

Inspired by the amazing art of Jason Limberg, I have gone a bit further than the prompt intended by pursuing the mythology of young women transforming into deer, which abound in European and North American folklore.

Unperfection

Under the overturned lute with its
One string I am going my way
Which has a strange sound
W.S. Merwin



Once a god gaped
and regurgitated the cosmos.

I wipe the spittle of stars
from my eyes

wondering about my designated place –
why particles of the air shift

around my lack of importance
and my unperfection.

There was a plan once
but I was never part of it –

neither heaven nor earth
were moved for me.


Day 20 ~ Unperfect

Your Muse

You that lose nothing
Know nothing
W.S. Merwin



Here comes the insurgent’s bride
dressed in leaves of green

She makes love to you in dreams
crushing fragments of yesterday

to dust beneath her bare feet
She has no use for futile tears

She will dismiss the faltering notes
of the song you sing for her

She is everywhere and nowhere now
Why do you choke on the taste of alone?


Day 19 ~ MUSE

I am hosting in The Imaginary Garden today with my Micro Poetry prompt: "I am my own muse".

This April Day

how children are apt to forget to remember
with up so floating many bells down)
e.e. cummings



April is painting this day
in every colour of crimson cosmos
and pomegranates cracking on the bough –
the Autumn skies are clear as a bell
ringing in shades of blue

This golden day is your own
laid out in patterns of fallen leaves 
and arrows of birds flying towards the sun –
Let me not measure loss in tears but
remember a rose has your name


Day 18 ~ PAINTED

Susie is our host in The Imaginary Garden today, with Bits of Inspiration: Bell

if i could go back in time(when you

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
e.e. cummings



if i could go back in time(when you
were mine;i was yours) would i find
the(right)words to undo the wrong
and let them fall,like drops of rain

(when an hourglass shatters,sands
stop sifting the minutes we count
as days between then and now) i
have spun instead the silken years

around the (beating seconds) spindle
of my heart,each a thread to bind
me,and,you (apart together) still
i journey back to your everywaking

(a sundial moves not, but shadows do)
morning,where you again take me

Day 17 ~ TIME

Sanaa is our host in The Imaginary Garden today, reminding us we are Somewhere in the midst of stirring April.

If I had to choose my favourite poet of all time, it would be cummings. He blew the lid off poetic norms, and rewrote the patterns of verse so distinctly than none could ever come close to emulating his art with any authenticity. Thus it is with extreme caution that I offer my attempt at a cummings' sonnet.

Poetry as Remedy

the poet like an acrobat
                                 climbs on rime
                                          to a high wire of his own making
Lawrence Ferlighetti




I might compare him
                        to a freedom-fighter
                                                or terrorist
words strapped to his chest
                           in place of bombs
finger on the trigger of his pen
                                       ready to spill ink

Or to something sweeter
                                   and more simple
                                                  a queen bee
laying her poems like larvae
                                        nurtured on nectar
                                              in the heart of a hive

But I believe poets are the remedy
                          for the hidden plague
                                              of verbal degradation
panacea for the blighted art
                    when functional illiteracy
                                                   rules the world


Day 16 ~ COMPARE

Anmol is our host of the Tuesday Platform in The Imaginary Garden today, inviting us to honour the centenary of Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

The Traveller Contemplates Immobility

I am still alive
but why silvery grass that
withers at the touch of the snow
Basho



My place is not here
but my ankles have been bound
to circular paths
                             
                               My unsleeping eyes
                               watch constellations turn
                               east to west by night

                               By day the wild swans
                               call to me their lost sister
                               in captivity

I’m tied to the stake
with fardels beneath my feet
words can’t set me free


Day 15 ~ 'Wherever I travel, wherever I happen to find myself, I am not from there.' Basho

Toni is our host in The Imaginary Garden today, inviting poets to contemplate A Touch of Snow. She asked for poems written in the haibun form, but I prefer not to mix prose and poetry, thus have used only the haiku form in the construction of my stanzas. Basho's Oku no Hosomichi was the direct source of inspiration for my poem.

Forced Confession

The world is a beautiful place to be born into
if you don’t mind happiness not always being very much fun
if you don’t mind a touch of hell
Lawrence Ferlinghetti



Civilized man has nothing to be proud of
this deathrow son of greed and opportunity
but he is told his sins will be forgiven
if he just confesses
confesses to the slavery
behind every wonder of the world
and slaughter in the construction of empires
confesses to gunpowder and the right to bear arms
confesses to dynamite funding peace prizes
confesses to cobblestones
paving the way for super highways
confesses to oil barons
and plastic beer can holders drowning dolphins
and starvation salting the fast food diet
and trash in Earth’s immediate orbit
But the civilized man in a clean cut suit
and minty fresh breath
whistles on his way to execution
no blindfold


Day 14 ~ CONFESS
Day 15 ~ SLAVE

Margaret is our host in The Imaginary Garden today, asking us for a view of The Streets.
I am afraid I went off the track here, but the poem did arise from a contemplation of the theme.

While the Light Lasts

It was a face which darkness could kill
                                                          in an instant
a face as easily hurt
                               by laughter or light
Lawrence Ferlighetti




His was a face
                   carved from wood stone
       bevelled with the light of 
                                                other days

composed to hide
                   the thoughts which twisted
        his heart into a knot of serpents
                                                but his eyes
shone with the light 
                              between oceans

“I am the devil,”
                            he told me
                                      a long time ago
“I am a witch,” I said
                                      “No mask can hide
                     from either of us
                                       all the light we cannot see”



Day 13 ~ LIGHT

Magaly is our host in The Imaginary Garden, asking us to create One Poem: Three Titles.
I have marked the book titles in italics.

The Light Between Oceans ~ M.L. Stedman
All the Light We Cannot See ~ Anthony Doerr
The Light of Other Days ~ Arthur C. Clarke
Title: While the Light Lasts ~ Agatha Christie

Despite This

“Poetry is a naked woman, a naked man, and the distance between them.”
Lawrence Ferlighetti




With eyes closed
                                     I know
                 where in the wild and tangled world
you are
             and the space between us
                                                       unsounded
and the silent clocks
                                still turning
                                                   swallowing
with each revolution
                 the hours of our separation
           
          and seasons
                                 and yet
I know
            everything that is beautiful in this life is
                               
                 you

                         despite this defacement
                                                                of love



Day 12 ~ DEFACE

Shay is our host in The Imaginary Garden of Fireblossom Friday: Love

& Friday 55, for those we lost along the way.

The Object of Introspection

But why dissect destiny with instruments 
    more highly specialized than the components of destiny 
            itself?
Marianne Moore



You examine your mind
as if it were a venetian glass paperweight
containing a multifoliate star, immensely
outreaching the orb in which it is contained –
but really so small, a shrivelled bit of tinsel
magnified a thousand-fold and seemingly
(for the instant) unfathomably deep.
You must conclude
that every thought you have is unoriginal,
and merely a repetition
of one you already had, syntax
slightly less grammatical, the day before.


Day 11 ~ GLASS

Izy is our host in the Imaginary Garden, asking us to relay News from Your Bed.

The Illustration

To a Steamroller ~ Marianne Moore
The illustration
is nothing to you without the application.

The Behemoth and The Leviathon
William Blake

The Almighty lords it over Job, pointing –
in Blake’s illustration – to his creatures.

Bear-like, ponderously cowed, the behemoth
slavers piteously, musculature carved in stone
or maybe ice.
There is an immobility to god’s demon
which strikes you as less a threat of war
and more an image of a beaten dog –

and writhing beneath in symbolic fury

the leviathan, spitting lava and seething
impotently from his watery wave, has a fiery eye
but limbless,
seems doomed to roiling magnificently –
You do not doubt the immediate effect
but rather the literal application

for land and sea, one nothing without the other,
both plundered beyond even an aged god’s redemption.


Day 10 ~ CREATURES

Anmol is our host in The Imaginary Garden today, with his prompt idea: Open a Book. The sentence I found from an anthology of modern poets, specifically my muse poet of the week, is the one quoted above by Marianne Moore.
I am also revisiting Blake's works this week, so my second source of inspiration is his Illustrations of the Book of Job.

Intrusion

‘it is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing 
but you cannot stand in the middle of this’
Marianne Moore



Only a dream
          the pressure of a hand
          placed on the back of my hand
in the dark as I reach for a notebook

on a table top, I tell my sleeping self.
          Do not be at all perturbed
          by the distinctly warm flesh
or sound of breathing quite close to

your ear; shall I argue with my dream
          voice? Or allow the scene to unfold
          with the intruder taking me
by the throat or into his arms?

Reality is as it is
          perceived; rightly or wrongly,
          it is all the same, yet I reassure
myself in dreams most kindly, and sleep on.


Day 9 ~ FLESH

Sanaa is our host in The Imaginary Garden, with Understand That This is a Dream.

Reliquary

I do these 
Things which I do, which please 
         No one but myself. 
Marianne Moore



To contemplate innate fear
is to take a view of one’s own infancy
as something of a relic, albeit statuesque,
and break it down to nothing
more than this:
I feared emptiness. Once.
My dreams disturbed me, because in them
I became someone else
whose thoughts were terror to me;
this excavation, however, is redundant.
Now I am the architect of my own silence
building monuments to solitude with my bare hands
and a nightmare is mere fodder for poetry.
To be lost, is freedom new-found.


Day 8 ~ MONUMENTS

Rommy is our host in The Imaginary Garden, asking us to face our Childhood Fears.

Etiquette of Marriage

“Expect poison from the standing water.” 
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell



Would we commit ourselves
to the vacuum of space,
knowing it means loss
of everything green and blue?
To be a stranger,
to marry the abysmal end
of all earthly things?
The well is poisoned
but we lay out the silver cutlery.
Are we willing to walk
naked through molten fields
to become as one?
The hands of the clock
are ticking in retrograde.
Could we cast off together
from the old world
to sanctify the new,
notwithstanding?


Day 7 ~ Marriage

Marian is our host in The Imaginary Garden with Just One Word: Etiquette.

Śaśaŋka

When the blackbird flew out of sight, 
It marked the edge 
Of one of many circles. 
Wallace Stevens

StarGazing Rabbit ~ Jason Limberg
Used with Permission

Here it is always April. Let us join hands, dance
a circle with the gossamer hare of the moon.

If you exist in the dream while sleeping reality,
let your coverlet be the cambric rabbit of the moon.

Because I lost my lover in the poppy fields,
I returned to the wild, jade hare of the moon.

The artist dips his pen in night’s fluid realm,
out slips the ephemeral rabbit of the moon.

As it was, so it is and it will be again…only stars
timeless, and the gracious hare of the moon.




Day 6 ~ GRACIOUS

I am the host of this day's prompt in The Imaginary Garden, where I introduce the artist, Jason Limberg, who so graciously allowed us to be inspired by his pen and ink.
Further examples of Jason's work can be found on Instagram @jasonlimberg or visit his website: HERE.


A Wee Note:
My poem is written in the form of a Ghazal, and is inspired by the many myths and legends of the rabbit in the moon.

śaśaŋka
One of the Sanskrit words for the Moon: शशाङ्क   
meaning ‘The one whose mark is a hare’

Rumours of War

Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once   
As quick as foxes 
Wallace Stevens



We, who live in shadow,
know hunger. We do not have
the stomach for small morsels

though our mouths are sewn
shut and our throats cut.
And still the children play

in the yard like unmindful
robins, their blood-drenched chests
haphazard beacons in the snow

of this perpetual winter.
In the unholy aftermath,
ours is the face of survival.


Day 5 ~ Survive

Izy is our host in The Imaginary Garden today asking What We Do in the Shadows.

Scarification

Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
Wallace Stevens



What seems to be a scar could be a door
sealed tighter than a canopic jar
and within, a small room hollowed out
of your own body, lined red as velvet,
and home to a tiny part of yourself, lost,
forever wandering, in need of an afterlife
reunion with your heart it left behind
in the unchronicled resting place
of a lesser pharaoh.


Day 4 ~ Chronicles

Sherry is our host in The Imaginary Garden today, singing Scars to Your Beautiful.

Night Music

A gold-feathered bird 
Sings in the palm, without human meaning, 
Without human feeling, a foreign song. 
Wallace Stevens



It could be a thread of music, woven
over, under the fabric of night
a single golden strand that wakes me –
lyrics of an old song rewritten
upon immaterial lines of my mind

a starling’s yellow beak that pecks
my sleeping eye awake and I know
yours is the voice singing to me somewhere
from an empty room on the edge of existence –
to waken me with thoughts of home.


Day 3 ~ MUSIC

Sanaa is our host in The Imaginary Garden today, inviting us to have late night conversations with the muse.

At the Coastline

In the one ear of the fisherman, who is all 
One ear, the wood doves are singing a single song 
Wallace Stevens



Washed up upon this simple shore, you find
as you were expected to, a shell as big as a house

to fit a tiny crab, who guards with quiet intent
his nacreous front door – and you are tentatively

inclined to knock, all too aware the private
nature of things to be about their own business

as it was a business of your own brought you
bare foot to the high water of a desolate coast

at the margins of your troubled mind –
this you know, yet still inclined to knock.



Day 2 ~ SHORE

Anmol is hosting The Tuesday Platform at The Imaginary Garden, looking at metaphors, quite perfectly in tune with my channeling of Wallace Stevens in Week One of NaPoWriMo 2019.

The Key

A man and a woman   
Are one.   
A man and a woman and a blackbird   
Are one.   
Wallace Stevens



I swallowed the key.
It hurt a little, stuck I think
on the way down
and now it sits
just beneath my breastbone
growing colder
than a cast iron padlock
frozen in place
on a dungeon door.

Love forged my chains.
I was willing to be fettered
by the heartstrings
to you who knew
so well my soul indivisible
between us
you held the key
which I now take back
and consume as my own.




And so begins NaPoWriMo 2019. In the first week, and perhaps for longer, I am drawing my inspiration from the poetry of Wallace Stevens, as I like to showcase my favourite poets in April, as well as writing my own pieces. Other sources of inspiration are The Imaginary Garden (which is hosting the Prompt-A-Day for the seventh consecutive year) and my own word list, derived from the sonnets of Shakespeare.


Day 1 ~ KEY

Marian is our host in The Imaginary Garden, singing April Come She Will.