Diving With Osprey

[vmh]

Hi Laurie:

Drawn Precision lives up to its name. Every word enunciated clearly. Nice.

The Great Cake, my dad used to say the same thing. Trick with layer cakes is to use a skewer through the middle until it is iced.

Love the idea behind Left-sided Neglect. It start in a more purposeful telling way, but moves to images that one couldn't imagine. Fun!

Amazing turn to your next poem, Deer on the Side of the Road. Great imagery, and I also like the give and take between N and the deer.

The Village kinda does the same thing that Left Sided Neglect does, starts in one place and ends in a very different one. Successfully too..

This Row is full of energy and damnation. Well done.

The line breaks in What Old Dogs teach are stellar.

Vicky

[UnkleBob]

Read through your poems today PClem. I think "the great cake experience" stuck out to me the most. A great little scene with a tight ending. "Old Dogs" was also enjoyable. I am dealing with a pair of old dogs these days - I find their general grumpiness and world weariness bring me great joy.

[beeswax]

Hello Laurie – . . . perhaps it forgot how to fly . . . That hit me on more than one level. Great stuff

The Great Cake Experience You musta went to the same cake frosting school as me!

Left Side Neglect – what a good topic for a poem! I got engrossed in the detail of this.

Deer on the Side of the Road is a lovely thing – you show us the beauty in natures recycling program.

The Village is horrifyingly realistic.

Old Dogs A lot to take in here. We know ourselves only through relationships.

On Trend is sweet and droll. Enjoyed reading through your thread today.

[Emilio]

PC, my favorite of these last is What Old Dogs Teach, not only for its human parallels, but it universal appeal. We've all experienced the aging dog, so we all can relate. My family has three old dogs, one passed away a few months ago, so this poem hits home.

NaPo on!

[JFN]

Laurie, a sad ending to your Pine Siskin. You describe the bird beautifulltly. The switch to the specimen at the Smithsonian is slightly jarring, but pleasently and effectively so.

The Great Cake Experience made me laugh. My kids haven't moved on to buildings yet, but we have had a duck, Pingu and Disney's Frozen requests. The duck was a bowl cake with a smaller one for its head covered in yellow icing; Pingu was a bowl cake with a smaller one for its head covered in white icing and crushed Oreos, and Frozen was a bowl cake covered in which icing with a plastic Olaf stuck on the top. I'm dreading something complicated.

...Woodpecker made me grin too. You have to admire their ingenuity really don't you.

tap dance on the back / of the hymnal, made me smile because I do just that. It's an interesting thought though. I'm going to be mentally logging everything I do with my left hand now.

Day 2 of Deer... is truly remarkable. There's something inside me that's always wanted to try a whole sparrow, but have never had the opportunity. I can just imagine that crunch of small bones. Also like I have eaten the fruit / of your neighbourhood.

The Village is an amusing piece. I love how it rises to absurdity towards the end, but somehow remains oddly believable. A sad indictment of modern popular opinion perhaps.

Love the tipping and sliding floors of ...Old Dogs..., they really give that sense of dealing with bad joints. The final couplet is strong too. Really like this one.

Sharp bitterness and anger coming through in This row.

Really like the disappearing house in ...AR5, it's strangely melancholic. I also love it when some screams past you to get stuck behind a tractor or some such.

I didn't see the last line of On Trend coming. Good fun.

Really enjoyed reading through your work so far.

John

[PClem]

Thank you all. Seriously behind. I figure if I write three a day, I will get caught up. Eventually. And I can do some serious fluffing

Prayer to the God of Dreams

I will not ask
you to rock my nights
with 95% off
sales on designer shoes
or gentle my furrowed brow
with promises of youth, renewed.
Just, please, remember
the days of academic terror
are thirty years old and don’t renew
the night tenure
of professors who plagued my days,
speaking on matters lost
in the Dewey Decimal system,
the endless clacking churn
of blue tests on ditto machines,
questions based entirely
on unassigned text.
And what is that alligator
you placed
in my backyard?

[Emilio]

PC, this was fun to read, the things N wants, the things that have troubled N, and the red hearing alligator, I loved this ending twist of dreams!

[Jee Leong]

Happy endings, in particular, this one: "The hush of fog, the thoughtfulness of dusk."

[PClem]

Thanks Emilio and Jee.

Photographing Migratory Birds


The professional photographer says,
as we stand close as a breath away
from the white mulberry tree,
with our cameras
shooting songbirds as they fly
in off the Gulf Coast from Mexico,
I have watched these birds land
on the beach, exhausted
and picked them up.
I have felt their hearts beating
as they died in my hand.
Just then, a woman walked up to us
and gently touched my shoulder and said,
sometimes you can see more
if you stand further away.



Mid April Grand Isle, Louisiana


And one particular white Mulberry tree is aflutter
with scarlet tanagers, indigo buntings,
yellow warblers. Exhausted from migration,
they gorge on fruit as birders flutter
around, one women warbles
I love your yellow boots. Laughing gulls screech
overhead, we gorge ourselves on so much
color - orange, green, red, blue. Someone points
and says Roseate Spoonbill overhead, I screech
my first; they look pink even against the sky.
The professional photographer says
I almost didn’t know
you in those yellow boots. Now everyone will.
The brightest bird is most elusive,
everyone asks have you seen
the painted bunting, no one admits
they have not, there is a claim
one man took a photo with his cell phone
of five in a row like suspects in a line up.
The man eludes us. We exhaust
ourselves in numbers games, the birds ignore
us. Someone asks where
did you get those yellow boots.

[5th column]

A word of admiration for 'Migratory Birds' - a keeper. 'Mid April' is also worth a workout post NaPo. The God of Dreams had me chuckling over me cawfee so thanks for that too

[PClem]

Thanks, Neil (?) I always get you confused with Matt. Or maybe I'm just plain wrong, which wouldn't be unusual.

Observations of Golf by a NonGolfer


I no longer watch television
or movies. My sunroom view
is a docudramedy. Caddy shack
out takes. Just as in the real thing,
the actors don’t know the viewers
are watching. An old golfer dashes
for the woods next to our house
to relieve himself while a fox bellies
onto the course and off
with his golf ball. Etiquette requires
a certain mode of dress, language
unrestricted and freely employed
as demonstrated by the man who plays
his ball in the drainage ditch, bounces
it off a rock back to the 17th hole
from near the 18th tee. I am closely related
to that man, not so
to the one who tramps
across my garden to whack
at his ball under my deck. I contemplate
entertaining my dogs by sending them out
to greet him. Instead, I just confuse
the golfers by tossing a few
of those that have been lost
in my yard onto the course.

[M]

Laurie, I loved the prayer. So awkward when our brain throws those weird things at us out of nowhere! Enjoyed the golf poem too. I had a fox in my backyard in TX. He fought with the cat. He liked to come in and steal dog toys too.

[kristalynn]

Your latest made me laugh! "Docudramedy" took me a little while. Love the word.

[PClem]

Thanks, Michelle and kristalynn. Started writing two poems tonight, neither of which I could finish (so much for trying to get caught up), partly because my daughter kept bugging me via text, so when you're given lemons, or a pesky kid...

Auto Correct (or how my daughter helped me write a kitty ditty)


My daughter was bugging me via text;
I told her to leave me alone,
I was poeming but it came out poem ingredients.
She suggested I use butter and chocolate chips;
everything is better with butter and chocolate chips.
I said I thought everything is supposed
to be better with cats. She said, yes but
they aren’t ingredients and I said, they are
if you mix them with butter and chocolate
but it came out better. She said it wouldn’t
be better if you gave them chocolate
because that would make them sick
and cat puke does not make a good ingredient.
And I told her it just made a half-assed cat
poem, but it came out half-asked and considering
context maybe it did.

[kristalynn]

Hello again, I wanted to make more comments before but ran out of time. I really like Photographer of Migratory Birds. The image of the beating heart and the truth in the last two lines. I enjoyed Prayer to the God of Dreams. It's funny, I actually do have an alligator in my backyard, but he's usually in the pond and I haven't seen him but my neighbors have seen him many times. It's interesting to me to think of students in school, do they know they are living the stuff of anxiety dreams for thirty years after they graduate?