Hello 😊

I am a bit late this week with a post, time has marched ahead of me as usual. I hope you all had a good weekend?

The poems I am going to share today both came from my dabblings with the Randomlists generator on the 21^st, in my writing session after my last post.  The first poem floated up after listening to some Mindvalley talks on YouTube (especially by Vishen Lakhiani) and the second just popped into my head from the words I was presented with, as often happens.   

I hope you enjoy them 😊

Prefer   Beg   Massive   Library   Stretch   Donkey   Guiltless   Sisters   Story

I prefer to meditate,

Then I feel I do not have to beg

For inspiration.

Instead, I am handed it

From the massive library of human consciousness –

Melded together in a new form

That seems a stretch for my mind.

But it is really the universe

That does the donkey work.

And I can sit here:

Revered and yet guiltless of fraud,

Pulled in the right directions

By a force greater than any of us.

Come, my soul sisters and brothers,

Let my story wash over you

And bid you strive for greater things.

Volleyball   Sheet   Calm   Jam   Lush   Injure   Collect   Next   Tempt

The smell of the ink

Made me think of long-ago Sundays

With my dad propped against the sun lounger

Hiding from our games of volleyball;

Turning each smudged sheet

While cultivating calm.

I would keep him company sometimes,

Dribbling strawberry jam

Down my t-shirts

While he pointed out the best football players

Or read to me a bit.

Our un-lush grass

Would see me injure myself a lot:

The smallest body

Jumping for the ball.

He would collect up my limbs,

Count them theatrically

And put me down next to him;

Tempt my smiles back

With sweet treats or songs.

It doesn’t matter how old I get,

Those memories keep me whole.

* WordPress seems to be messing about with the size and position of my images today, but hopefully you get the idea…

[additional pics are from Pixabay, here and here]

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Copyright © 2019  Montaffera All Rights Reserved

Please do not use any of my content (posts, pictures, poetry etc) without my permission, but feel free to link back to my blog if something catches your eye. Thank you!

Hello!

“…Today, I’d like to challenge you to blend…concepts into your own work, by producing a poem that meditates, from a position of tranquility, on an emotion you have felt powerfully. You might try including a dramatic, declarative statement, like Hass’s “All the new thinking is about loss,” or O’Hara’s “It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so.” Or, like, Baudelaire, you might try addressing your feeling directly, as if it were a person you could talk to. There are as many approaches to this as there are poets, and poems.” [from the NaPoWriMo site]

Well, I don’t know about you, but if I ‘meditate’ on an issue I’m having, my inner wisdom has a way of never pulling her punch.  I get it squarely between the eyes and have to stop flinching and actually accept the lesson before I can move on.  I get a lot of these home truths dealt to me while doing mundane things like washing our dishes, folding laundry or just wandering back from the school run looking at the sky…

Something I read (or someone said) might stay with me, and my inner wisdom will shrug and tell me that I might not like it, but if I look across the patterns of my day-to-day there is this piece of evidence, this silly sabotaging habit, this phrase I use that proves that person/book was at least half relevant to something I’m wrestling with.  There is usually a very annoying list of achievable steps that gets presented to me as well, or a YouTube video pops up that is ridiculously well timed…don’t you just hate that?!

This poem came out of our need to start tweaking things around the house now that the kids are getting more independent and the fixtures and fittings are not holding up as well as they used to, etc etc… 

If it gets too good they’ll change it,

Better not get comfy here;

Then your confidence won’t be hit

When ‘they’ turn – and you can’t steer.

So: these walls did not get painted

And this carpet’s still the same

As the day the previous owners

Picked it out – yes I’m to blame;

And there’s still unopened boxes

Lurking in our storage piles

That I have no heart to ditch yet

So keep lugging o’er the miles.

I think I’m waiting for some signal

That I can trust what is good

Not to vanish like a mirage

If I drop my guard. Then: stood

In the glow of my achievements

(And the knowledge I now hold)

I’ll stop running scripts from childhood

And refusing to be bold…

So that’s my little pep talk with myself over for another day 😉

That’s the penultimate poem of NaPoWriMo dusted, too!  Whoa!

Catch you tomorrow…

[Pic is from here]

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Copyright © 2019 Montaffera All Rights Reserved

Please do not use any of my content (posts, pictures, poetry etc) without my permission, but feel free to link back to my blog if something catches your eye. Thank you!

Hello!

The prompt on the NaPoWriMo site had very specific criteria today:

“I’d like to challenge you to write a poem that:
• Is specific to a season
• Uses imagery that relates to all five senses (sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell)
• Includes a rhetorical question, (like Keats’ “where are the songs of spring?”)”

After faffing about writing a kind of ode to our Cherry Blossom tree in the garden (which is looking very pretty just now) and failing to include more than two senses, I came up with the below. I originally forgot to include the rhetorical question, but tweaked the end to incorporate it 😉

Every morning this week
The aroma of earth, cut grass and breeze –
Collecting up my wanderlust
And making me despise routine.
Just let the children sleep in!
The sun has created a masterpiece
In gold and fluffy pink;
And the best soundtrack
Is peaceful breath
From dreaming kids.

(Woodpigeon agrees
As his call he silences)
I curse the window-squeak
As I inch it wider.
I’m yearning now
For the delicate velvet of petals
Against weathered hands,
And the unmistakable waft
Of neighbours’ charcoal;
Seeming to coat my tongue
In the promise of feasts…

But the next moment
The most pressing ‘spring’
Becomes that in my Youngest’s bladder.

Isn’t it marvellous how perfect
A single curl can seem,
Burnished by a rogue ray, as he runs?

Only five days of this challenge left! I wonder what I’ll be writing about tomorrow…?!

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Copyright © 2019 Montaffera All Rights Reserved

Please do not use any of my content (posts, pictures, poetry etc) without my permission, but feel free to link back to my blog if something catches your eye. Thank you!

Hey 🙂

Happy Easter, dear readers!!

“Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a poem that, like The Color of Pomegranates and “City That Does Not Sleep,” incorporates wild, surreal images. Try to play around with writing that doesn’t make formal sense, but which engages all the senses and involves dream-logic.” [from the NaPoWriMo site]

I got to the end of the day and once more was extremely tired, so I think I was actually dreaming when I wrote this poem!  It’s a bit Enid Blyton meets nonense-y, which kind of fulfils the prompt?  Anyway, it also rhymes, which I thought was impressive for my attention span after lots of Easter fun with the boys in the (sunny!!!) back garden 😉

It is reminiscent of the stuff I used to write in early high school, come to think of it.  Awww, my subconscious mind is still semi-childlike (!!)

Oh, and because I was supposed to make the poem a bit weird, I enlisted the Jimpix generator’s help, too…

We should have gorged upon their finest Malt

And eaten scabby horses

(A mammal most delicious when

The second of six courses)

Our location swiftly hidden from

The Pandicorn stampede,

(Our host-gnome having promised

Our safety was guaranteed)

We went onwards with our merry march,

Shown fairy-crafted arts.

Somewhere near humans’ Bradiford

Griffin dances made their start.

Showcasing colours various

With sequin-like great wings

Dragons rendered combustible

All elven garland strings…

But soon the time did come again

When we had to depart –

Step out of fae imaginings

Real life’s course once more to chart.

Ach, it’ll do 😉

Take care, and I’ll catch you later!

[Pic is from here]

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Please do not use any of my content (posts, pictures, poetry etc) without my permission, but feel free to link back to my blog if something catches your eye. Thank you!

Hi!

“Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem about something mysterious and spooky!”

Not one to deny the NaPoWriMo gods their fun, I came up with this wee ditty:

It’s eerily quiet

The playroom’s awash

With the sound of their nothing

And tidiness – gosh!

One of the last schoolday cuddles of them being 8 and 5!

There’s none of the bickering/

Playing the fool

I do believe…

…what’s that…?

They’ve gone back to school?!!

Two weeks have gone by rather quickly, all in all, and I will be walking our boys down the road on Monday a ‘whole year’ older (and with a few sad little hugs along the way, no doubt).  They are getting so BIG and, although it is rather full-on parenting 12+ hours every day for two weeks, the house will indeed be ghostly without them.

They will be off again on the 19^th and 22^nd for Easter, mind you – and so will hubby! 😉

I’ll see YOU here tomorrow, as it also marks the end of the second week of Glo/NaPoWriMo!  Exciting!

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Copyright © 2019 Montaffera All Rights Reserved

Please do not use any of my content (posts, pictures, poetry etc) without my permission, but feel free to link back to my blog if something catches your eye. Thank you!

Hi 🙂

My optional prompt said:

“Today, taking a leaf from Elhillo’s work, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem of origin. Where are you from? Not just geographically, but emotionally, physically, spiritually?”

I can feel a bit of emotional turmoil coming on…

My ‘reality’ lies in a place far from here

(That I carry around every day)

In a flounce of blonde curls

In the twirl of a dress

In the unfettered rapture of play.

My ‘comfortable’ lies in the accepting smiles

Of a generation I still miss,

In a record’s crackle,

In the stories and songs;

In the slow and muted Sunday bliss.

My empathy mourns at too many graves.

Borne too early, it’s said from ‘misdeed’;

The silt of their follies

The sting of their regrets:

All that potential joy gone to seed…

In a church wrapped in mist, sits a being of light

(Who is male, because that’s what I craved)

He sees only my good,

I’m fin’lly understood!

He just loves: needs no deference or slave.

What do you feel are your roots…?

Meet you back here tomorrow to see what new poem originates from my keyboard!

(Yes, I am definitely missing my biros and pencils, but I am having to speed-write these as the kids are off…so it is straight into type at the moment!)

[Pic is from here]

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Copyright © 2019 Montaffera All Rights Reserved

Please do not use any of my content (posts, pictures, poetry etc) without my permission, but feel free to link back to my blog if something catches your eye. Thank you!

Hello!

“Today, I’d like to challenge you to write your own Sei Shonagon-style list of “things.” What things? Well, that’s for you to decide!”

…said the #NaPoWriMo site.

So I twirled around in this airy idea for a while, and just wrote what came to mind 😉 

My boys make endless verbal lists of how they rank things:

Updating, rechecking, asking each other if they agree;

I get stumped when they probe what my favourite this, that or the other is –

I don’t know why.

It makes me feel…unkind? Unworldly? Unmasked?

I was keeping a written list of all the poems I’d ever penned, back in the 90s.

I still have it, each title numbered.  I remember the gist of some.

My endless paper pile sometimes yields the scribbled texts.

I have a notebook full of troll names, too.

I gave them family trees by matching colours of hair

and deciding which were the kids.

Over the years

There were schedules I rarely followed,

Characters I left half-formed,

Reams of quotes from books;

Text messages I was loath to lose to deletion, when my phone only held the most precious fifteen…

At present, there are the affirmations I might one day use,

Printed pages of “10 ways to…” tackle everything from housework to a child’s tantrum,

And my “3 wins” documented for every day since the start of this year.

But the ones I unearth most often now are the holiday/visit lists;

For mother/adulthood, at key points in the year, always calls for a

“Wardrobe simplification exercise”

 Or a “dust-bunny eradication plan”.

My life: charted by my corresponding obsessions and necessities.

An archive of snippets, a flurry of thought.

What do you write lists about?  Have you kept any from your younger years?

Catch you tomorrow!

[Pic is from here]

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Copyright © 2019 Montaffera All Rights Reserved

Please do not use any of my content (posts, pictures, poetry etc) without my permission, but feel free to link back to my blog if something catches your eye. Thank you!

Hey there 🙂

It was Eldest’s birthday today, and the Na/GloPoWriMo prompt  decided to run with this nicely:

Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem of gifts and joy. What would you give yourself, if you could have anything? What would you give someone else?

Happy writing!

Youngest’s birthday was only eight days ago.

I get sentimental at this time of year, I warn you now…the start of the poem is Eldest’s answer to “what would you like for your birthday if you could have anything?” while he was talking about his X-Box adventures 😉

“Sixty-four emeralds!”  – said with a grin

(For Minecraft – it’s all ‘invent’ry’ will fit in)

Why did I not know that all we’d to do

Was ‘dig’ him up a shiny green thing or two?!

I wish that my joy could be bought with such ease –

I’m standing here mourning that time is a thief,

And I’m wishing this handsome young man with bed-hair

Could somehow rewind a few years…it’s not fair!

Though, better still, please the capacity

To visit myself in my uncertainty

In each parenting stage (once at last I am wise)

With assurances, hugs – more rational eyes.

It would be nice to think in my quiet old age

I could comfort my young self, sow peace through my days;

That the next time I felt like collapsing in sobs,

I’d be at my own shoulder,

                                           whisp’ring softly:

                                                                       “Good job…!”

I am getting this up on the blog at a ridiculously wee hour of the morning, so I must dash, but I’ll be back later for day eight.  Ciao for now!

[Pic is from here]

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Copyright © 2019 Montaffera All Rights Reserved

Please do not use any of my content (posts, pictures, poetry etc) without my permission, but feel free to link back to my blog if something catches your eye. Thank you!

Hi!

A foray into the villanelle style was one of the three suggestions to get me crafting today’s poem.  Not an easy task, but I had a bash at it!

The site says:

The classic villanelle has five three-line stanzas followed by a final, four-line stanza. The first and third lines of the first stanza alternately repeat as the last lines of the following three-line stanzas, before being used as the last two lines of the final quatrain.

I also found it described as having a rhyme scheme of: A¹bA² abA¹ abA² abA¹ abA² abA¹A²   on Wikipedia, where the capital A stands for a repeated refrain, and the number after each signifies which of the two it is…

I went for the version that has 10 syllables to a line, too.

Anyway, all this complicated stuff can be explained better by just getting to the poem!  So here goes:

I cannot run, also I cannot kill.

This conundrum – it haunts my waking hours.

Why’s every word they say so freaking shrill?

To stay civil is taking all my skill,

All I want’s ten minutes in the shower.

I cannot run, also I cannot kill.

Our two having a Lego superhero adventure together on the X-Box (semi-amicably)

“I can’t make brothers disappear at will…”

(Thank the lord our tablet still has power)

Why’s every word they say so freaking shrill?!

“I do not have a magic wand or pill.”

“Don’t make that face at me, your milk will sour.”

I cannot run!!  Also: I cannot kill.

“Get down from there! No jumping off the ‘sills!”

“Flatulence is not your superpower…”

Whyyyyyyy’s every word they say so freaking shrill…?!

Their hearts and tummies never seem to fill,

I feel one day they’ll all of me devour.

I cannot run. Also, I cannot kill.

WHY’S EVERY WORD THEY SAY SO FREAKING SHRIIIIIIIIIILL??!!!

Did I mention that the kids were on holiday this week and next?! 😀

Hope you got a giggle or two out of today’s poem (I like the superpower line!!), and I’ll hopefully be back soon with tomorrow’s offering 😉

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Copyright © 2019 Montaffera All Rights Reserved

Please do not use any of my content (posts, pictures, poetry etc) without my permission, but feel free to link back to my blog if something catches your eye. Thank you!

Hello all!!

Yes, I know: it’s been almost six months since I showed up here and posted some of my ramblings…there are many ‘excuses’ that spring to mind, but it all comes under the umbrella of needing a break from the expectations I was putting myself under, and a yearning to explore my creativity without constraint.

It is the start of Global/National Poetry Writing Month tomorrow, however, and I thought that this was probably a good opportunity to get back into some regular blog writing again.  In the month of April, it is customary to write a poem a day and pop it up on one’s website for others to read. 

I have been trying to write at least 500 words a day in a document on my computer since the 18^th of February, just to see what comes out, and I have been dabbling in the odd Random Word Poem again, using one of the sites I used to frequent at the beginning of my blogging days. 

It is Mother’s Day in the UK today (I live in Scotland), and the second of the two poems I wrote in my practice yesterday fits nicely with this, I feel:

“Deer mum”,

It starts, but he has to think,

So he proceeds

To insert each finger

Slowly into his ear

One at a time;

The findings examined with care.

I think about the atmosphere

I left back ‘home’.

The plane swooping through clouds.

I listen for any sign

We might be in danger,

Hope we can depend

On Ben’s silent lack of Press…

My child decides on

“I love you!!!“

To end his epistle;

Enlists a medieval knight to

Hasten it across seats.

I finished listening to the prequel of “The Oxford Tearoom Mysteries” on Friday, and I think maybe it seeped into my poem a little, too.  It starts with a flight from Australia to England and hints at past lives…

I wonder what has happened between ‘Ben’ and the speaker in my poem? 

[Pic is from here]

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Copyright © 2019  Montaffera All Rights Reserved

Please do not use any of my content (posts, pictures, poetry etc) without my permission, but feel free to link back to my blog if something catches your eye. Thank you!