Monday, August 18, 2008

It's Bad Poetry Day...


No, I didn't make that up... Today is a very minor holiday- Bad Poetry Day 


In celebration here is one of my own poems:

Ode to a Library Book

Transporter. Personal Time Machine. Thick pages of story.
Narrating me away from stripped hearts and accusations.
You travel past the dingy hall, yellowed by a smoker's haze

Improviser of the written word, you are chosen from many.
Words read aloud reverberate against a wall of silence,
surprising the little me who picked you from a tattered shelf.

My small self in a crumpled dress, library card in hand.
A Wrinkle in time, The boxcar Children, Anne of Greene Gables.
Your worn pages transport me towards childhood's passage.

I hide under a pillow with a flashlight and M&M's.
Living among horses, Indians, and carriages.
Loud voices, empty eyes, but bravery and time travel fill mine.

Father has bloodied mum's lip, but I'm already gone.
Lost in battles of fables, myth and legend.
flying alongside dragons, I make order out of chaos.

It's another August evening, the warmth of families in the air,
but I never want to come home. Hide me in a small corner.
Surround me, soothing voice of fibber, fabricator, reciter of tales.


I wrote this for my writing class. It is a work in progress and I plan to revise it. Reading has always served me as an escape, especially from a tough childhood. 

In the Fall, I will be taking my third class at The Writers Studio.

This upcoming session, I plan to concentrate on writing poetry. This has always been an interest of mine and I'm excited to have a chance to focus on language and imagery in a more compressed way. I hope it will give me a chance to explore poetry more in depth, as well as enhance my fiction writing.  

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
-W. H. Auden

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.
-Rita Dove

3 comments:

Elle said...

Oh ... I am so glad you posted this, I really really like it.
great job and have fun in the new class.

Momisodes said...

I loved this :)

I wish I could write decent poetry. Squeezing my thoughts into so many words is tough. I tend to ramble.

Unknown said...

Ahhhhh, Eleanor finally got you to go over to the dark side!!! Good for you. Awesome. I miss all of you.