“Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them.” Friedrich Nietzsche
January Is On the Wane
after Sor Juan Inés de la Cruz
January is on the wane leaving behind early dark
and champagne hopes for the genus Rosa.
Garden roses want pruning now, solicitous cultivation.
Layer shorter under taller, drape on trellises
and over pergolas, the promise of color and scent,
climbers retelling their stories in a ballet up stone walls,
an heirloom lace of tea roses, a voluptuous panorama
rhymed with shrubs and rock roses in poetic repetition.
Feminine pulchritude: their majesties in royal reds
or sometimes subdued in pink or purple gentility,
a cadmium-yellow civil sensibility, their haute couture.
Is it the thorny rose we love or the way it mirrors us
in our own beauty and barbarism, our flow into decrepitude?
They remind of our mortality with blooms, ebbs, and bows
to destiny. A noble life, by fate transformed in season.
Divinely fulsome, that genus Rosa, sun-lighted, reflexed. And January? January is ever on the wane.
A Una Rosa
Rosa divina que en gentil cultura
eres, con tu fragrante sutileza,
magisterio purpureo en la belleza,
enseñanza nevada a la hermosura.
Amago de la humana arquitectura,
ejemplo de la vana gentileza,
en cuyo ser unió naturaleza
la cuna alegre y triste sepultura.
¡Cuán altiva en tu pompa, presumida,
soberbia, el riesgo de morir desdeñas,
y luego desmayada y encogida
de tu caduco ser das mustias señas,
con que con docta muerte y necia vida,
viviendo engañas y muriendo enseñas!
– Sor Juan Inés de la Cruz (Juana Inés de Asbaje y Ramírez de Santillana)
WEDNESDAY WRITING PROMPT
I thought we’d do something a bit different this week. I hope it’s something everyone will enjoy. Instead of a theme, write a poem in the spirit of one that you love and was written by someone else. Put your poem in the comments section and reference the poem you’re working off of.
please submit your poem/s by pasting them into the comments section and not by sharing a link
please submit poems only, no photos, illustrations, essays, stories, or other prose
PLEASE NOTE:
Poems submitted through email or Facebook will not be published.
IF this is your first time joining us for The Poet by Day, Wednesday Writing Prompt, please send a brief bio and photo to me at thepoetbyday@gmail.com to introduce yourself to the community … and to me :-). These are partnered with your poem/s on first publication.
PLEASE send the bio ONLY if you are with us on this for the first time AND only if you have posted a poem (or a link to one of yours) on theme in the comments section below.
Deadline: Monday, September 23 by 8 pm Pacific Time. If you are unsure when that would be in your time zone, check The Time Zone Converter.
Anyone may take part Wednesday Writing Prompt, no matter the status of your career: novice, emerging or pro. It’s about exercising the poetic muscle, showcasing your work, and getting to know other poets who might be new to you.
You are welcome – encouraged – to share your poems in a language other than English but please accompany it with a translation into English.
Jamie Dedes. I’m a freelance writer, poet, content editor, and blogger. I also manage The BeZineand its associated activities and The Poet by Dayjamiededes.com, an info hub for writers meant to encourage good but lesser-known poets, women and minority poets, outsider artists, and artists just finding their voices in maturity. The Poet by Day is dedicated to supporting freedom of artistic expression and human rights. Email thepoetbyday@gmail.com for permissions, commissions, or assignments.
“no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark … Warsan Shire, Home
Lost the family traditions, the familiar grounds, the
Old home place, the neighbors and neighborhoods
Left behind in the great leap to safety, hope dreamed
But not found through forced marches across the
Desert or sailing the brutal sea in boats that shed
Them, so much flotsam, drifting and nameless,
Leaving grieving hearts in their survivor bodies
Stories shared, commiseration with strangers, now
Tents dot hectares of campgrounds, like so many
Emojis of despair and anger, leaving their stain
And soon or late, count on it, the piper will call
Jamie Dedes. I’m a freelance writer, poet, content editor, and blogger. I also manage The BeZineand its associated activities and The Poet by Dayjamiededes.com, an info hub for writers meant to encourage good but lesser-known poets, women and minority poets, outsider artists, and artists just finding their voices in maturity. The Poet by Day is dedicated to supporting freedom of artistic expression and human rights. Email thepoetbyday@gmail.com for permissions, commissions, or assignments.
Bible for Thomas Butts (series) c. 1805 pen and gray ink with watercolor over graphite
“The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.” Viktor Shklovsky
“Everything can go wild within the fierce symmetry of Blake’s art.” Laura Cumming
“Good and evil may well have the same face or physique in Blake’s conceit.” Laura Cumming
Brown bears in Yosemite, the rangers said in the heat, beware.
In all the splendor of this gray stone, thick smells of money over-
whelm the perfumed shorts of the extra-tanned tourists.
These bears they said could jump and strike, so be safe, they said. It was almost like someone
had struck a match and turned safety upside
down. Made the dawn-to-dusk-already-insecurity-of
our-flimsy-poor- man’s-Camp-Curry-life more unfamiliar
and fearful. Made daily life big and soupy, defamiliarized.
Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky once urged artists to make
old things new by turning them strange and unfamiliar. All these people saying unfamiliar things I muttered soft over their saying.
William Blake, he takes these extremities
and clashes them closer.
Mashes them into themselves.
When I look hard at these bold colored shapes:
that huge monster dragon, the woman pressed dainty upon a yellow sun-heart,
I don’t know if I’m seeing juxtaposition or sameness. Or know what he’d hope I’d see. They kind of collapse together curiously, peaceful and disturbed: different and bound.
In fact they meet strangely and fill space up almost as a voracious bundle.
I had almost missed their looking, that hot frozen attention,
examining each other inside like a scientist counting cells
What stuns when I look more is that they are so big,
so nearly eye to eye.
They stare hard it seems to preserve
the astonishment of this wordless moment
Just like the always strangeness of the way William Blake kisses our eyes,
daring our looking more in the fervent struggle to see it his way.
He takes emotions on a life ride, much like life in Yosemite
he rides us far into our fear of bears and awe of the stone and then that woman
oddly “clothed,” nearly buried in the sun who flaunts her looking
at the dragon, daring him with coy looking like a Victorian lady would.
Blake collided good and evil like this, he welded and wedded them,
Close and ineffable. Astride and authentic.
His heart-life on the side of the woman and goodness
But he would keep it whole and near, keep it together.
Laura Cummings surmised that good and evil may well have the same face or physique in Blake’s conceit.
White and dirty, big and small.
Good and evil. Innocence and experience.
Those basics which we differentiate too soon.
Blake’s wild and immaculate art helps look deeply beyond that division,
To see it not as something finished, tamed and pretty
But its naked contrasts raked and real, agitated, and spun
In a sea/see of magnificents like they are, in all of this fixed looking.
Master Blake puts on his canvas what he knows when he sees it, not after.
LINDA E. CHOWN grew up in Berkeley, Ca. in the days of action. Civil Rights arrests at Sheraton Palace and Auto Row. BA UC Berkeley Intellectual History; MA Creative Writing SFSU; PHd Comparative Literature University of Washington. Four books of poetry. Many poems published on line at Numero Cinq, Empty Mirror, The Bezine, Dura, Poet Head and others. Many articles on Oliver Sachs, Doris Lessing, Virginia Woolf, and many others. Twenty years in Spain with friends who lived through the worst of Franco. I was in Spain (Granada, Conil and Cádiz) during Franco’s rule, there the day of his death when people took to the streets in celebration. Interviewed nine major Spanish Women Novelists, including Ana María Matute and Carmen Laforet and Carmen Martín Gaite.
Jamie Dedes. I’m a freelance writer, poet, content editor, and blogger. I also manage The BeZineand its associated activities and The Poet by Dayjamiededes.com, an info hub for writers meant to encourage good but lesser-known poets, women and minority poets, outsider artists, and artists just finding their voices in maturity. The Poet by Day is dedicated to supporting freedom of artistic expression and human rights. Email thepoetbyday@gmail.com for permissions, commissions, or assignments.
Our Lady of Kazan, Theotokos (Greek: Θεοτόκος Greek pronunciation: [θeoˈtokos) is a title of Mary, mother of Jesus, used especially in Eastern Christianity. The usual Latin translations, Dei Genetrix or Deipara (approximately “parent (fem.) of God”), are “Mother of God” or “God-bearer
“It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream,” Edgar Allan Poe
At morn—at noon—at twilight dim—
Maria! thou hast heard my hymn!
In joy and wo—in good and ill—
Mother of God, be with me still!
When the Hours flew brightly by,
And not a cloud obscured the sky,
My soul, lest it should truant be,
Thy grace did guide to thine and thee;
Now, when storms of Fate o’ercast
Darkly my Present and my Past,
Let my Future radiant shine
With sweet hopes of thee and thine!
– Edgar Allan Poe
Poe, in a modern retouched version of the “Ultima Thule” daguerreotype courtesy of Mathew Brady – U.S. National Archives and Records Administration
Edgar Allan Poe (1809 – 1849) was an American writer, editor, and literary critic, best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. He is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism and was one of my country’s earliest practitioners of the short story.
Poe is considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre and is credited with contributing to the then emerging genre of science fiction. He was the first well-known American writer to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financial difficulties for himself and family.
Cottage in Fordham (now the Bronx) where Poe spent his last years. Photo courtesy of Zoirusha and generously released into the Public Domain
Jamie Dedes. I’m a freelance writer, poet, content editor, and blogger. I also manage The BeZineand its associated activities and The Poet by Dayjamiededes.com, an info hub for writers meant to encourage good but lesser-known poets, women and minority poets, outsider artists, and artists just finding their voices in maturity. The Poet by Day is dedicated to supporting freedom of artistic expression and human rights. Email thepoetbyday@gmail.com for permissions, commissions, or assignments.
Recent and Upcoming in Digital PublicationsPoets Advocate for Peace, Justice, and Sustainability, YOPP! , September * The Damask Garden, In a Woman’s Voice, August 11, 2019 / This short story is dedicated to all refugees. That would be one in every 113 people. * Five poems, Spirit of Nature, Opa Anthology of Poetry, 2019 *From the Small Beginning, Entropy Magazine (Enclave, #Final Poems), July 2019 * Over His Morning Coffee, Front Porch Review, July 2019 *Three poems, Our Poetry Archive, September 2019
“Every pair of eyes facing you has probably experienced something you could not endure.” Lucille Clifton
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Jamie Dedes. I’m a freelance writer, poet, content editor, and blogger. I also manage The BeZine and its associated activities and The Poet by Day jamiededes.com, an info hub for writers meant to encourage good but lesser-known poets, women and minority poets, outsider artists, and artists just finding their voices in maturity. The Poet by Day is dedicated to supporting freedom of artistic expression and human rights. Email thepoetbyday@gmail.com for permissions, commissions, or assignments.
Jamie Dedes' THE POET BY DAY Webzine 