the night was dark
the sky was blue

and through the sky
a toilet flew

a man was hit!
a scream was heard!

a man was killed by a flying
turd.

- thank you

We Write

“…to taste life twice”, Anais said
and surely she would know
who tasted much, chose her
morsels with gutsy grace
in times when one had space,
time to chew on elegance,
dip crust into mulligan
stockingless for a taste
of bittersweet truth.

Love amidst the ruins,
feasts in silken gowns,
creative conspiracies,
typed regurgitatons
more flavorful than ever,
fed to those more hungry
than small birds for life
they’d savor if only
it were on their menu
or in tin lunch boxes.
Mary Curro

I was also looking for poems “of the moment”, this being a *live* medium, after all. Thank you for yours.

Listen

stepping through wet meadow grasses before light this earliest morning without rainfall
you hear hedgerow rustlings
louder than the mourning dove’s reminder
and then there it is
sliding upward in a fury of song
the sun
you can hear the sun rise, you know,
as easily as the moon tonight
will croon its roundest melody
All day and forever these sounds will stay in your day and night.
you won’t hear the world otherwise
you never have.
..

The amount of poetry being written and published online is simply amazing. What I respect about the Internet is that it allows people like me, a wife and mother with a full-time career, to keep up with some of the best contemporary writing today. Poetry is like ivy, it can thrive almost anywhere.

Here is a link to my blog, Poet Mom and my new current favorite, Poetry Thursday. Both sites are attempts to continue the poetry conversation beyond the classroom.

One of my favorite poems is by Tess Gallagher:

I Stop Writing the Poem

to fold the clothes. No matter who lives
or who dies, I’m still a woman.
I’ll always have plenty to do.
I bring the arms of his shirt
together. Nothing can stop
our tenderness. I’ll get back
to the poem. I’ll get back to being
a woman. But for now
there’s a shirt, a giant shirt
in my hands, and somewhere a small girl
standing next to her mother
watching to see how it’s done.

But I guess the three of us are on our own here. We’re writing verses, because of the groundswell of “citizen’s media” movements.

Many years hence, people looking for the Great Flood of 2006 will have many ‘reader photos’ from Boston.com to look through. But how many observations will they have of the sun finally emerging after the first time in almost a week?

That’s why I interjected that little Dickinsonian verse above. And also that’s why why Adam Gaffin at Universal Hub gamely found a couple of local blog posts of the moment– though neither of them aimed to be poetic.

Mine was in the same vein as yours – “an act of poetry.” I like the concept. Perhaps we could have thread for “Random Acts of Poetry”

just to explain my posts above, bear in mind that the undercurrent ethos of the blogs is that anyone can become a writer, or journalist; and, even, it’s been figured, that any average person can “commit an act of journalism,” why can’t someone commit an “act of poetry” as well?

I like the elephant poems.

Your poetry disturbs me
like a toaster in the sand
I grasp my throbbing temples
like a toaster in the sand
I hope your mother isn’t listening
like a toaster in the sand
Give me Keats and Frost and Silverstein
like a toaster in the sand
New voices strain to entertain
like a toaster in the sand
More monolog sans talent
like a toaster in the sand
You’re about as intertaining
as a toaster in the sand

I try.

but hey!
wait! up in the sky!
could it be? out West, beyond the clouds?
that old rebel Sol,
the Sun!

Consolation, by Wislawa Szymborska

Darwin.
They say he read novels to relax,
But only certain kinds:
nothing that ended unhappily.
If anything like that turned up,
enraged, he flung the book into the fire.

True or not,
I’m ready to believe it.

Scanning in his mind so many times and places,
he’d had enough of dying species,
the triumphs of the strong over the weak,
the endless struggles to survive,
all doomed sooner or later.
He’d earned the right to happy endings,
at least in fiction
with its diminutions.

Hence the indispensable
silver lining,
the lovers reunited, the families reconciled,
the doubts dispelled, fidelity rewarded,
fortunes regained, treasures uncovered,
stiff-necked neighbors mending their ways,
good names restored, greed daunted,
old maids married off to worthy parsons,
troublemakers banished to other hemispheres,
forgers of documents tossed down the stairs,
seducers scurrying to the altar,
orphans sheltered, widows comforted,
pride humbled, wounds healed over,
prodigal sons summoned home,
cups of sorrow thrown into the ocean,
hankies drenched with tears of reconciliation,
general merriment and celebration,
and the dog Fido,
gone astray in the first chapter,
turns up barking gladly
in the last.

Escape from it all
behind the deafening white noise of the waterfall
through the refreshing torrent
see a bit of life

focus
there is a truth
whether pain or beauty
on the other side of the veil

focus
part the waters
they part you
make you laugh or wail

you knew this truth
it was always there
the fall of the water
just laid it bare

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair grows in me
and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

A Warning To My Readers

Do not think me gentle
because I speak in praise
of gentleness, or elegant
because I honor the grace
that keeps this world. I am
a man crude as any,
gross of speech, intolerant,
stubborn, angry, full
of fits and furies. That I
may have spoken well
at times, is not natural.
A wonder is what it is

http://www.tipiglen.dircon.co.uk/berrynot.html

The Layers

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
previous to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.