M Christine Delea's Blog, page 10

It ain’t heavy, it’s my purse by Marge Piercy

It ain’t heavy, it’s my purse

by Marge Piercy

(published in her 1992 book, Mars and Her Children, Knopf)

We have marsupial instincts, women

who lug purses as big as garbage igloos,

women who hang leather hippos from their shoulders:

we are hiding the helpless greedy naked worms

of our intentions shivering in chaos.

In bags the size of Manhattan studio apartments,

we carry not merely the apparatus of neatness

and legality, cards, licenses, combs,

mirrors, spare glasses, lens fluid,

but hex...

The Thing Is by Ellen Bass

The Thing Is

by Ellen Bass

(published in her 2002 book, Mules of Love, BOA Editions)

to love life, to love it even

when you have no stomach for it

and everything you've held dear

crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,

your throat filled with the silt of it.

When grief sits with you, its tropical heat

thickening the air, heavy as water

more fit for gills than lungs;

when grief weighs you down like your own flesh

only more of it, an obesity of grief,

you think, How can a body understand this...

In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa by Ada Limón

In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa

by Ada Limón

(published in The Best American Poetry 2024, edited by Mary Jo Salter and David Lehman, Scribner)

Arching under the night sky inky

with black expansiveness, we point

to the planets we know, we

pin quick wishes on stars. From earth,

we read the sky as if it is an unerring book

of the universe, expert and evident.

Still, there are mysteries below our sky:

the whale song, the songbird singing

its call in the bough of a wind-shaken tree.

...

The Last Prompt Post

Yep! That's correct!

From now on, you can get my fabulous prompts on my Substack, Peeled Citrus Prompts. I post them on Tuesdays and Fridays (in the past, I also posted on Sundays, but those were my prompts from this blog). You can subscribe for free (or pay me if you like!) and get prompts twice a week.

Today's prompt: Diane Glancy's poem, "Without Title," (which works on 2 levels) is today's blof poem. It is about her father. Today, write about your father. (or paint him, make a Dad collage...

Without Title by Diane Glancy

Without Title

   for my Father who lived without ceremony

by Diane Glancy

(published in her 1990 book, Iron Woman, New Rivers Press)

It’s hard you know without the buffalo,

the shaman, the arrow,

but my father went out each day to hunt

as though he had them.

He worked in the stockyards.

All his life he brought us meat.

No one marked his first kill,

no one sang his buffalo song.

Without a vision he had migrated to the city

and went to work in the packing house.

When he brought home his horns ...

Shots by Belle Waring

Shots

by Belle Waring

(published in her book, Dark Blonde, 1997, Sarabande Books)

Three nurses to hold him, this four-year-old who kicks me

crazy in the belly--six months pregnant but ha!

I've got the needle--the Measles-Mumps-Rubella.

Child, it stings like hell.

Listen to me, my little immunized enemy--

I'll take a bruise from you

before I'll see another kid like the one carried through the clinic doors

at the end of shift in his father's arms, seizing

seizing

The father's shirt is

black w...

Back and Forth: Prompt

For an example of what today's prompt asks of you, look at today's blog poem, "Bird Nests Used to Look More Like Fortresses," by Martin Ott, originally published in Press 53, Issue 139.

In his poem, Ott goes back and forth between his family--and his worries for and about them--and information about bird nests, gradually bringing the two two topics together as one. It is quite clever and it works very well in his poem.

See if you can do something similar with what you create today. I used this...

Bird Nests Used to Look More Like Fortresses by Martin Ott

Bird Nests Used to Look More Like Fortresses

by Martin Ott

(published in Press 53, Issue 139, OCT-DEC 2018)

 

My daughter just failed her driving test.

The cradle of the nest allows for easier

delivery of food and fledgling flight.

Worried about a call, a rude awakening.

My son just walked seven miles playing

Pokémon Go. The dangers of predators

can strike the hatchlings from any angle.

Worried he won’t look up in his crossing.

My wife just got her green card. The rules

of what keeps you clos...

A Life You Might Say You Might Live by Constance Urdang

A Life You Might Say You Might Live

by Constance Urdang

(published in 100 Great Poems by Women, edited by Carolyn Kizer,

1995, The Ecco Press)

You might call it a road,

This track that swerves across the dry field,

And you might call this alley a street,

This alley that stumbles downhill between the high walls

And what you might call doorways, these black mouths

That open into caves you might call houses;

And if you turned at the corner

Into a narrower alley, you might still call it

Going...

Curtains, Too: Prompt

Please read Ruth Stone's poem, "Curtains."

Look at the curtains in the room you are currently in, or think about some past curtains. Imagine your perfect curtains in your dream house. Recall a room you were once in that had no curtains and really needed some. Theater curtains? Shoes sticking out from under curtains? A shower curtain?

In other words, really dig deep into curtains.

Then paint them, draw them, write about them. Put some curtains into paper art or a quilt. Build a puppet stage ...