Friday, February 12, 2010

Purging Poetic Presention

I rarely use First Person.  I never consciously use Form.  I never Allude to Classic Literature. I don't use Apostrophe. I never employ Rhetorical Questions. 

The assignment for ReadWritePoem was to take one's poetry writing to the SPA and detox old habits.  This is a busy time for me - snow, travel, double duties - and I wasn't going to participate this week.  Then  I remembered - several years ago I wrote this poem because I wanted to purge my poetry technique.  There is a synchronicity in creative endeavor - what I did on my own, was exactly what this week's prompt asks us to do.  Please consider this poem, tucked away as an exploration, as my contribution this week.


Mad Mooness



I awake to find the moon
sitting on my window sill
glorifying the perfect
roundness of himself.


Aren’t you the fat fellow
preening there! Have you
stopped running to hide
behind my thumb?


Is it safe to lie here under
your cool gaze, knowing
your reputation for rascality,
your devious charms?


Or your jealousy? But surely
even Artemis wouldn’t covet
my plump body and its
lost virginity.


Maybe you’re a bodiless head,
flung into the void by your avenging
mom, a family thing.
If so, I need no coaching.


Though your shining’s turned
me blue, an unfamiliar corpse,
I won’t succumb to your
mad mooness. . .


but wait, where’d you go?
You’ve slipped from my sill
to hide behind a tree.
You are being chased after all.


                  Wanda McCollar

Thursday, February 4, 2010

Before Alpha Realizes It's Omega


                                                                                            
Dark.  Lying flat on sand
still warm from day, watching
the night sky narrate the past
one hundred million years
or more,
consumed by thoughts so numerous
impossible to separate
except as awe.


Dark.  Above the bed
passing car lights' rippled shapes
hover, stretch, flicker out,
return, rush past, fade away. 
No awe,
curious, accepted patterns,
ceiling narrations
of the future.

                       Wanda McCollar