Well, here we are: Tuesday! This brings us to this week’s poetic responses to last week’s Wednesday Writing Prompt, Philosopher’s Stone, September 20. The poems that follow give us an intimate and intense view of our regularly participating poets, either from the perspective of family connection, educational inspiration, or perspectives on art and philosophy. Enjoy!
… and do come out and exercise your poetic imagination tomorrow for the next Wednesday Writing Prompt. All are welcome no matter where in the world you live, no matter your style or your status as a poet: amateur or professional, beginning, emerging or established. These prompts are theme based, not form based. All works shared on theme will be posted in next Tuesday’s collection. You may share your poems – or even prose – or a link to your theme-based work in the comments section below.
.the bull box.
i read Glyn Hughes, some times.
sometimes, i look at the photograph,
and wonder how it was that last year;
think of
how you wrote to me, sent
me your book
with a private inscription.
© 2017, Sonja Benskin Mesher (Sonja Benskin Mesher, RCA and Sonja’s Drawings)
.norway square.
you said nothing is ever perfect, and
i remember this and why.
reciting, shouting, jumping on walls
laughing.
you sent a book, along
with the money due.
st.ives.
© 2017, Sonja Benskin Mesher (Sonja Benskin Mesher, RCA and Sonja’s Drawings)
Gobbo!
how you live in my mind!
genius teacher of boys other than myself
(never in your class) so often floating past me
in your ungainly manner
during those severely wounded years
shortly after the period of reciprocal destruction
known peremptorily as World War Two
you had been caught (I have always imagined)
in a random machine gun volley
down some dark & horrible defile
stinking of blood & death
all in the same old idiot cause
returning after great suffering being pieced together
to Kingston Grammar School to amble disjointedly
along its corridors nick-named perhaps brutally
by previous generations of unkind boys to indicate
that they could hardly understand
a single word of yours whether spoken in fluent
Latin Greek Russian French or German
your command of which survived the wounds
of neck & face as well as arms & legs
and who knows what else now grave secrets
but once I heard you solo speaking loud & clear
in Dvorak’s Cello Concerto playing now
on the gramophone – and it’s not Rostropovich
but Gobbo as it might have been weeping for joy
at his survival in spite of all the suffering
this darkening evening in late autumn
© 2017, Colin Blundell (Colin Blundell, All and Everything)
Colin writes: ‘Gobbo’ haunted me from 1948 to 1954 although I never spoke to him nor did he teach me. He was clearly an artist and a role model!
J. Berger
It must have been a repeat
Must have been.
As “Ways Of Seeing” was on
when I was nine.
I made a choice
to look and listen.
To reciprocate.
I’d never thought looking
had a history.
A artist makes
a list of choices.
What you looked at
had a history.
An artist makes
a testimony.
How you saw
had a history.
A witness out of true
with my world now.
Learnt to look
from different perspectives.
Find the story
in the out of true.
© 2017, Paul Brookes (The Wombwell Rainbow, Inspiration, History, Imagination)
“Bartholomew Street” after “Tempest Avenue” by Ian McMillan
Harold half way down collects wood
for his fire, leave it out front.
Leave out anything metal Gypsies at top have sharp eyes,
Stan, two doors down
wants his radiator gone.
Dave next door holds ladder
while I look at roof tiles
and shares homemade ale after.
Our roofers knew man who murdered
a man
at bottom.
I thought someone murdered
at top but our lass swears
he was only badly beaten
Old gent Tommy three doors down
quiet when his wife died last Summer
Put thumbs up when I cleared
his path of Snow last Winter.
Pear tree in back garden bagged
up by them all when ripe
as too much for our lass and me.
© 2017, Paul Brookes (The Wombwell Rainbow, Inspiration, History, Imagination)
# Palping his verses #
Making up his abode in a distant land
Discerning the blue sea
He pierced beside me
Watery moonbeam playing on his visage
Vehicled abruptly his fervid miraculous fingers
Attiring a necklace of words
A mystic film
A palace of jade
I glowered at him except twinkling of my eyes
Surmising his authentic essence
Of a man a spirit or a god
Relating me his volition
to foozle me in his sea beside his mushy windy casuarina arbors
He left
Hurling his words into the blue bay
But nothing finaled
Albeit I recounter ,counsel
and -grope his lustre
Palping eyes of his verses
Savoring his left pages …
© 2017, Kakali Das Ghosh
The poet that was my father
Dedicated to Grisa Gherghei
The poet was my father
He read his poems to our family friends
And all were mesmerized by them
How wise, how deep, how entangled but also bold
In a time of dictatorship
The poet was my hero
Till one day when the feeble man crawl from under his own built effigie
Sad day for me
I became deaf to his words
And started writing my own lines
Lines on my own coin
The poet left
Vaporised in some blond vagina
Only then I have found that was his pattern
Sliding slowly from one black hole to the next vortex
Blond haired and with witchy eyes
The poet and me lost track from one another then
I remained with the one instilled by him in the cells of my soul
Later, decades later
The poet have raised again from his pit
He stands besides his trees
The trees that in one of his poems were craving to see a naked woman for they never been in paradise
© 2017, Iulia Gherghei (Sky Under Construction)
ABOUT THE POET BY DAY
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The translation is by Stephen Mitchell and is the best I’ve read. Find the poem in Mitchell’s translation of The Selected Poetry of Rainer Marie Rilke.
Jamie Dedes' THE POET BY DAY Webzine 