Category Archives: Poetry

NaPoWriMo: Why Can’t I

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(I am participating in National/Global Poetry Month as I continue to write small poems each morning. – Kevin)

Day Sixteen: Why Can’t I

Why can’t I
protect you?
Why can’t I
hold you
hug you
meet you
find you
in the quiet corner
of the classroom
with sad eyes,
shedding tears,
caught in confusion?
Why can’t I
comfort you
when you
need comfort most,
when your mood
has gone sour
and blue,
all of a sudden,
on you?
Why can’t I
do what it is
teachers
like us are
all driven
to do?
Why can’t I
reach you
when you
need me to?
Why?
Why can’t
I?

Listen: https://some.audio/5e9821ee28d3ee0fa9951020

Peace (why can’t we?),
Kevin

NaPoWriMo: The Poet, Alone

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(I am participating in National/Global Poetry Month as I continue to write small poems each morning. – Kevin)

Day Fifteen: The Poet, Alone

The poet
stops to think
of the subject
of matter at
hand, takes a
drink in pause
to better
understand,
draws a line
of a letter to
the edge of the
paper, the
first ink mark
of what might
later become
the possibility
of a poem,
imagines a
gap from
subject to
pen, the writer
at home, alone,
again

Peace (writer, write peace),
Kevin

NaPoWriMo: Sleep Pen Dream

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(I am participating in National/Global Poetry Month as I continue to write small poems each morning. – Kevin)

Day Fourteen: Sleep Pen Dream

Coyote phantoms
howling dreams,
last night’s
moonlight cracking
through the seams …
I’m writing poems
again in my sleep,
some deep pen
scribbling lines
trying to keep up
with the madness,
just out of reach

Peace (in the moment of waking),
Kevin

NaPoWriMo: We Are Wire (Poets of the Pandemic)

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We Are Wire (found poem)

We Are Wire (Poets of the Pandemic)

A Found Poem gathered from within: Dispatches from the Pandemic
Via The New Yorker magazine, April 13, 2020, pages 34-49
Original writers: Ben Lerner, Rick Moody, Weike Wang, Vinson Cunningham, Lorrie Moore, Edwidge Danticat, Maggie Nelson, Donald Atrim, Karen Russell, and Bryan Washington

Look skyward at this hour
to clock this moment –
for our burdens
are not equally
distributed; the statistics
break down

We need other people’s voices,
for we are not born wired
– We are Wire –
calling through these faint
networks toward the heart

When fear and loneliness
seem to last an eternity,
and in reversal, fragility; greater –
this is when the outside
looks most like empty streets,
flat, with new calm

Maybe we still will bear witness
to these mad dashes of love,
imagining each stranger’s head
crowned by a saint’s halo

All of us are somewhere,
searching for Shalom;
the window signs beckon us:
We, the failed poets
of the Pandemic –

the unstressed syllable
the embodied rhythm
the heartbeat
a pulse

Peace (and poets),
Kevin

NaPoWriMo: Ode to a Resting Spot

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(I am participating in National/Global Poetry Month as I continue to write small poems each morning. – Kevin)

Day Eleven

Ode to the Resting Spot on the Mill River
Leeds, Massachusetts, USA

This place is forever different
from the ways we remember:
rock bridges turn asunder;
broken tree limbs buried,
the writer’s left, to wonder:

of ice dams of December;
flooding from September;
the March release of mountains;
summer’s gentle fountains;

All enact their toll,
taken as payment,
for infinite hands
relentlessly carving
this river line

These lands we think we know
remain a mystery, an unknowable
force scrambling its way to ocean
with no worry of the wreckage
left behind

Note: This is both my daily poem and my Water Poem Project today — combining the two morning writing activities together — sort of like, two currents swirling together.

Peace (forever in motion),
Kevin

NaPoWriMo: Take Time Today

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(I am participating in National/Global Poetry Month as I continue to write small poems each morning. – Kevin)

Day Nine: Take Time Today

If ever there’s been permission
to stand closer and attentive to the land,
to notice what you didn’t notice before,
consider it today

Take time today
to see the soil in new light,
the way new grass sleeves bend
in twilight, damp with dew
and moonlight

Take time today
to inhale the fragrance, the flowers
whose tight winter slumbers turn over
and whose form functions
as unbound

Take time today
to eavesdrop on the songs of skies,
bright birds warbling warm symphonies
in tree-top serenades, to each other,
for each other

Take time today
to listen, let it be the world’s love
let it be something stronger than hope,
holding us together, standing today,
in this moment

Peace (awakening in the local),
Kevin

NaPoWriMo: John Prine’s Mind

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(I am participating in National/Global Poetry Month as I continue to write small poems each morning. – Kevin)

Day Eight: John Prine’s Mind

All the people
populating the mind
of John Prine
will forever linger on,
odd characters like us
seeking balance
on bent lines

Note: Songwriter extraordinaire John Prine died from complications of Covid-19 yesterday. He was always a writer with a guitar, exploring the landscape of characters.

Peace (leaves us vacant),
Kevin