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INVITATION … and reminder …

City Birds
City Birds

Unfortunately, I’ve unexpectedly had to take some time off from regular posts and updates, but here today is an invitation/reminder to join us –  The Bardo Group Bequines – at The BeZine for 100,000 Poets (and other artists and friends) for Change (100TPC): on September 15th for the Zine and on September 24th for the 100TPC virtual event, which is celebrated from our blog.  The themes for both are Environment and Environmental Justice.

Priscilla Galasso is the lead for the Zine in September.

Michael Dickel is the Master of Ceremonies for our 100TPC virtual event.

These are worthy efforts to:

  • help steer public discourse in a productive direction,
  • define issues and suggest possible solutions,
  • encourage consensus for the environmental and social good, and
  • connect people and raise the general consciousness.

Please do participate. All work will be archived on site and at Stanford University.

Zine submissions should be sent to bardogroup@gmail.com. Please read submission guidelines first. The deadline is September 10th.

Reader participation on the 24th for the virtual event is by way of the comments section or Mister Linkey. Michael will provide direction in his blog-post that day.

More detail is included in: If We Were Rioting in 120 Countries, You’d See Us on the 6 P.M. news: We’re not, so here’s everything you need to know about 100TPC.

Also of note, Michael Rothenberg, cofounder of the 100TPC global initiative, reminds everyone today that it is not too late to register as an organizer of an event.  While ours is a virtual event, people all over the world in 120 countries to date are sponsoring events in homes, schools, places of worship, cafés and restaurants, parks, community centers and other sites where people gather. Link HERE to register.

By way of warm-up, this Wednesday and next, I’ll post prompts on The Poet by Day related to the themes. 

In the Spirit of Peace, Love and Community
and on behalf of The Bardo Group Beguines,
Jamie

© photograph, Jamie Dedes

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I Remember You and the Amber Moon, a poem … and therein lies your Wednesday Writing Prompt

file3761333734081When I remember you
I remember the amber moon
and the burnished brown of old oaks,
their leaves like hands waving goodbye
Summertime, as dusk transitioned to dark,
we’d sit on the beach by slow cooking-fires,
their coals gone from hard black to gray dust
I cherished your warm hug in the chill of the night
and falling asleep, safe

I stopped loving you,
but I never stopped loving the memory of you
I carry that with me on lunatic trips of the heart ~
though my preference is to rest solitary on forest logs
with their stunning imperfections and those
secret-lives swirling in the sunless damp on which they rest

I think of the path that led from then to now,
a mix of smooth and rough along a rocky coast ~
I live near the sea to breathe
I imagine you living, wherever you are –
by an ocean with your skin still smelling of Old Spice,
with your well-formed hands, the hands of a pianist and surgeon,
and the high-tensile strength of your mind

In the odd geography of life, no one knows where we came from
or how it was, how it felt to be us in the days of promise
when the spell of Hudson Bay fell like a prayer to St. Christopher
That bay is no longer our safe harbor,
but it gave us our sturdy roots and strong wings
and so the nights, the nights by this bay are good
When I smile at the amber moon, it smiles at you

– Jamie Dedes

WRITING PROMPT

Unfortunately first loves aren’t everyone’s happiest memory. Nonetheless, they often are good experiences from which to write.  Write an epistolary poem or prose piece that tells the story of your first love from the perspective of time and expresses how you feel today about that experience and that person.

© 2013, poem, Jamie Dedes, All rights reserved; Photo credit ~ Anne Lowe, Public Domain Pictures.net

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unROMANTIC POEMS, because love poems are elegies

 

wine-and-fruitHangover

at the grocery ~
Meeting accidentally in the wine section
you sip me shyly with gentle conversation
and read the label on my selection,
your hand brushes mine, a sensual appeal
It’s for drunken pasta! I explain,
you laugh and say you’d rather drink than eat it
your eyes are Wedgwood blue and hold a wistful smile
you imagine I’m something fine, a vintage port
you’re flushed with the fancied sweetness
I could drink you too, a sturdy Bordeaux
but I no longer deal well with hangovers

Crane_frog4

To the Frog at the Door

if you kiss a frog, so I’ve been told
there’s a chance he’ll turn into a prince
a frog prince, which means you have
you absolutely have to love him
and i’ve loved a few frogs, at least
i think i have, they never became princes
nor did their love morph me into a princess
i’m still a cranky old crow, we are what we are,
loving frogs and crows isn’t transformative
….why should it be?
one woman’s frog is another woman’s prince

…….as for this old crow

………….she loves flying solo

…….not that you asked

© 2013, poems, Jamie Dedes, All rights reserved; Illustration ~ Wine and fruit photo courtesy of Jean Boufort, Public Domain Pictures. net and The Frog Prince by Walter Crane (1845-1915), U.S. Public Domain

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WHO WILL FORGIVE GOD, a poem . . . and therein lies your Wednesday Writing Prompt

"The Apotheosis of War" 1871, Vasily Vereshchagin
“The Apotheosis of War”

God is on our side …
without a shadow of a doubt
they said and
no nay-saying her parents
her husband, her people
the politicos and demigods
their war-mongering

her eyes surveilled the warriors as
they cut across fields of innocence,
they stomped and postured

no Light shining from dark disorder
no Joy in parting a sea of blood

in her heart: doubts
large, lively, captive
packed tight into small muscle,
specters beating at the walls

ribs
sore

eyes
burning

soul
aching

they know not what they do

God forgives them all, she was taught
But who will forgive God

– Jamie Dedes

Vasili Vereshchagin
Vasili Vereshchagin

The Apotheosis of War painting (1871) is by Vasily Vereshchagin (1842-1904), a Russian artist, who dedicated this painting and one other – Left Behind  (a wounded Russian soldier abandoned by his comrades) – “to all conquerors, past, present and to come…”

WRITING PROMPT

There were several observations that contributed to this poem but, most of all, it was reading some comments on Facebook, especially this one: “If this is God’s will then God has a lot of explaining to do.”  War, destruction, murder: God’s will, free will, or the apotheosis of nihilism (insanity)? Write something that – by virtue of its brevity – is pungent: a poem or perhaps a parable.

Please feel free to put a link to your poem or parable below in comments so that I and others may come read your work.

© 2016, poem, Jamie Dedes, All rights reserved; the portrait of Vasili Vereshchagin and the photograph of “The Apotheosis of War” are both in public domain.