“But when fall comes, kicking summer out on its treacherous ass as it always does one day sometime after the midpoint of September, it stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed. It settles in the way an old friend will settle into your favorite chair and take out his pipe and light it and then fill the afternoon with stories of places he has been and things he has done since last he saw you.”
― Stephen King, Salem's Lot
Greetings to all poets, friends and toads. Summer arrived in Southern Africa this week, with temperatures reaching 30C (86F)... sadly, Spring barely gets a look in. Are the winds of changing blowing in your part of the world too? Luckily for us, the climate in the Imaginary Garden is always temperate, which makes it one of my favourite places to be all year round.
Please join us today with your choice of poem, relax and enjoy the company.
I encountered this word [megafauna] only recently while blog hopping, instantly i took a liking to it [megafauna] and said to myself,
i must use this word [megafauna].
So here am i, in the imaginary garden this weekend prompting my new fond real word megafauna - In terrestrial zoology, megafauna (Ancient Greek mégalo "large" + New Latin fauna "animal") are large or giant animals. The most common thresholds used are weight over 40 kilograms (90 lb) over 44 kilograms (100 lb) or over a metric ton 1,000 kilograms (2,205 lb)
So here's what you'll do. Write a poem in no more than 100 words about any megafauna you choose (living or extinct). Form and content is up to you. Word count however is stipulated (100 words)
You may (but don't have to) use the images at the begining of this post as a source of inspiration in fashioning your words to poetry.
One more thing - You must, must have fun, while FASHIONING YOUR WORDS
I’m thrilled today to introduce my Garden friends to my in-real-life friend and truly lovely songwriter and person BRANDI EDISS. Yay! Brandi moved here just over a year ago and my life--really the whole valley in which we reside--is dramatically improved by Brandi’s presence. She writes and performs super-purty songs and has a tremendous skill for portrait photography, among other talents.
Been thinking about sharing this song "Little Tiny" in the Garden for quite a while and I feel certain that it will receive a warm reception from you all. I can relate to the vulnerability and feelings Brandi bravely sings about here, and I think many of you might as well.
Click around Brandi’s YouTube page for more great and often festive offerings (for example, my favorite of her originals is "This Is My Stupid Boyfriend"). Brandi is working on recording her first CD Bees and Bees and Bees, to be released later this year. Enjoy!
And oh yeah, this is a poetry prompt! Your task today is to be inspired by Brandi’s song to write your own verse on the subject(s) of being and/or feeling alone, building walls, glockenspiels and jingle bells, cliches and replays, or anything else "Little Tiny" brings up for you.
The Projectionist’s Nightmare This is the projectionist’s nightmare: A bird finds its way into the cinema, Finds the beam, flies down it, smashes into a screen depicting a garden, a sunset and two people being nice to each other. Real blood, intestines, slither down the likeness of a tree. “This is no good,” screams the audience, “This is not what we came to see.”
Today is the day we put the "mini' back into the Sunday Mini-Challenge, and return to the option of form poetry. The object of this challenge is to write a poem in no more than 10 lines (but you may write in fewer than 10 lines all the way down to a single American sentence). You may choose your own form or stick to free verse, if preferred.
This weekend, our frame of reference is 'This is not what we came to see...' quoted from Brian Patten's poem, The Projectionist's Nightmare. Follow the link given above to Patten's website where more of his work is available to read.
I look forward to reading a number of short poems, from Saturday through to Monday. The link does not expire, so please feel free to write more than one poem, and a return to comment on poems linked later would be appreciated.
Inspired by my desperate desire to sleep for about twenty hours, a desire that will not see fruition any time soon, I bring you a challenge to write about--or from--a dream.
You can write about someone having a dream, or experiencing a dream-like state. You can write based on something you dreamt yourself. But let me be clear, I am talking about night-time, sleeping-type dreams, not dreams as in dreams of world peace or suchlike.
So draw the blinds, get out the opium, dial up your sleep number bed, and run naked down the street to your old school to take a test you haven't prepared for. No haiku, no reruns.
Click HERE for more great quotes about
IMAGINATION
Greetings to all friends, poets and toads.
It is poet's choice in the garden today, with the emphasis on sharing and caring. So please link up and take a while to enjoy the work of fellow poets - these are the voices of our times.
I love bees. I don’t see many of them in New York City these
days, which makes me rather sad. I’m currently visiting with my in laws, and
there are bees everywhere—in their garden, in the surrounding woods, and bees
galore in a nearby lavender farm—life is good.
For today’s Weekend Mini-Challenge, I invite you to share a
bit of bee poetry… specifically, we
will write poems that explore a moment in the life of one of the three bees
flying in the stanza quoted above. And because 3 is such a lovely number, let’s craft our poems in exactly
three stanzas.
Please write a new poem for this prompt. Let us know which
of the three bees you’ve chosen to write about. Add a direct link to your new
poem to Mr. Linky. Buzz around other Toads’ gardens.
P.S. I will be gone most of the afternoon and early evening.
I shall delight in your bee poetry later tonight. Read you then, dear Toads!
I've been traveling for work most of the past several months.
from visitrapidcity.com
At present I'm in Sturgis, South Dakota, for the 76th annual motorcycle rally. Mt. Rushmore is about an hour away. Hail the size of baseballs fell last night about 30 miles north. Rain like rivers plunged from the sky in the late afternoon, leaving bikers pummeled, tired. The rest of the time, heat curls anything of color into concrete grey.
via alamy.com
People watching is... to use an overused cliche'... epic. The local bars are gigantic affairs, with door signs warning 'no colors or weapons'. (Colors are the bandana or other items that show membership in a particular bike gang, and are not about banning people of color.) (Though by a vast majority, visitors are white.) Food is of two varieties: fried, and fried. Decided not to try the local sushi restaurant. People are invariably polite, though - Sturgis is neutral ground. Hallowed, even. Maybe that's why Harley colors are orange and black...
This month, the twist on the list is this: pick *at least* 3 cities / locations that you have visited, want to visit, or wish you never had. Can be fact or fiction. Why were/are you there? What did you do / are you doing there? Are they, or how are they connected?
All in iambic pentameter.
:) Just kidding. Form not required. Heck, in Sturgis, clothes are somewhat optional. Corey, google it...
As a reminder, please write a new poem, post it to your blog, and link that specific poem in Mr. Linky below. The prompt will remain open, so feel free to return later. As ever, travel to other participant's sites and leave a note that you popped in.
Thanks for stopping by.
~ M
(all above photos fair use - will remove if requested. photos below by author)
"A poem can come out of something seen, something overheard, listening to music, an article in a newspaper, a book, a combination of all these… There’s a kind of emotional release that I then find in the act of writing the poem. It’s not, ‘I’m now going to sit down and write a poem about this.’"
-- Adrienne Rich, 1929-2012
On this and every Tuesday in the Imaginary Garden, the rules are simple: Share a poem with us, and visit others during the week.
Greetings to all poets and friends!
It is time for the Flash 55 Challenge in the month of August. The rules of this prompt have not changed: Write a piece of poetry or prose on a subject of your choice in precisely 55 WORDS.
For the OPTIONAL EXTRA part of this challenge, I invite you to consider the word LACUNA.
According to The Free Dictionary.com, it means
1. An empty space or a missing part; a gap
2. A cavity, space, or depression, especially in a bone
Its origins lie in the Latin word, lacus, meaning lake - hence lacuna (pool or cavity) and the Italian, laguna (lagoon).
If you select this part of the challenge, explore the idea of a missing part or the more literal meaning of the definition.
Feel free to post more than one 55-word piece to this prompt, which will remain first on the Home Page until Tuesday morning. Please return to enjoy the poetry of fellow poets.
Hello Toads! I'm happy to be a part of this thriving community of poets and to write my first mid-week challenge post here. I often wake early to write, and so many journal entries reflect what is left in my consciousness from dreaming. The following journal entry stayed with me for days afterwards because voices, spaces and songbirds seem woven into the fabric of my skin -- and so, I will share it with you:
I was dreaming about birds. Large, expansive wings billowing like clouds through the sky. White and clean, like Edelweiss flowers. Soft feathers rising in an arc across the sky, cutting close to the horizon. And there were sounds and names - the skylark, meadowlark, nightingale, linnet & finch. Whole songs about birds that have shaped part of my musical life, their songs and tinny voices weaved with my own. I stood and sang about a lone, wild bird in lofty flight, a bird who carried both loneliness and beauty, calling for a great spirit. In the song, I was both a part of the earth and something beyond it, something that could soar above it with great power and peace.
Western Meadowlark
Green Finch and Linnet
How many songbirds are there and what messages do they carry? Their energy comes from light, form earth, and from the vast sky - all which are on loan to us. A sort of impermanent beauty. Or perhaps it is us that are the fleeting ones? Yes, it feels as if they belong to this earth and we are just fortunate borrowers, thieves of their songs.
Before dreaming about birds I was lying awake, replaying songs in my mind and thinking about the space around me. How the space I stood in felt as if the air was permeated with an energy that flows from sound. How that energy feels, how it tastes - the way it lingers after a song ends.
We are rooted in the earth but music is not - its notes, like the bird's voice, are elusive, ephemeral - ethereal - like fairy's wings shimmering across the sky. They glimmer for a second and are lost, not gone but simply moving forward to a new space.
This, I think, is a connection worth pursuing: between ourselves and the spaces that exist in time, the space in a room, around us, on the page. The quality of air in a space, in our breath, our bodies and on earth around us. Inevitably, space leads to ground, solid under our feet - to the sky above, to water below. The Challenge:
Write a poem about the connection I described above between ourselves and the spaces around and within us: Where and how does your human voice, the poet's voice (or even the bird's voice) fit within those spaces? You are welcome to respond with a poem of any length, in any form, and from the perspective of either human or bird.
Not surprisingly, both musicians and poets alike have been inspired by birdsong. One of my favorite bird songs to sing is Meadowlark -- here sung by the fabulous Liz Callaway. Not required listening but wonderful for inspiration!
I recently read this wonderful, bird-inspired poetry collection.
“I want to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
By the time this is posted, I will be away on a retreat -- as it is our last official week of summer here in Louisiana, before kids, teachers and school administrators go back to work. I look forward to reading your poems when I return, hopefully refreshed and ready to sing, teach and write once more.
Greetings to all poets, toads, friends. Thank you for dropping in to hang out for a while in our poetic environs.. a small retreat from the pressures of that thing called 'the working day' or 'the rest of the world'.
Please link up a poem of your choice today, and enjoy the offerings of our fellow poets who have come here to share their work.
