Category Archives: Poetry

by | October 20, 2023 · 5:15 am

Winter Flowers: #TankaTuesday

This is the 2nd portion of the “Cold Dew” season for Colleen Chesebro’s #TankaTuesday challenge based on the 24 Japanese seasons.

At this time every year in Arizona, we pull out the “summer flowers,” the annuals that we plant in May. We replace them with “winter flowers.” Usually red geraniums are featured, as they are this year. In the last few years we have much fewer choices than we used to have. This year, we had even less choice–and the red geraniums don’t look very good. I hope they perk up once planted. Today is the day we plant!

The topic of my tanka is our winter flowers.

Our summer flowers

have drooped and browned by the house.

Today we release

them from the earth to make room

for winter’s colors.

I made up the kigo “winter flowers” because it is such a part of this season.

On another note, I heard yesterday that my poetry collection Rooted and Winged, which was a Book Excellence winner, is Runnerup in the PenCraft Book Awards 2023. Woot!!!!

On another note, I don’t know how about anybody else, but I am feeling very drained and saddened over world events. I am also horrified by the anti-Semitism rampant on Twitter/X. I’ve joined Bluesky and am only following writers and people I know. Friends, if you want to join, I have a couple of codes. First come, first served.

43 Comments

Filed under #amwriting, #bloggingcommunity, #poetrycommunity, #TankaTuesday, Flora, Garden, and Landscape, Poetry, Syllabic Poetry, Writing

Tagged as , , , , ,

by | October 11, 2023 · 5:15 am

“Cold Dew” Season: #TankaTuesday

This is the “Cold Dew” season for Colleen Chesebro’s #TankaTuesday challenge based on the 24 Japanese seasons.

All Northern Hemisphere Weather is Not Similar

When I was a child in Michigan I loved fall because by the end of idyllic summers I was bored and ready for a change. My neighbor had a huge garden, and he let us harvest his pumpkin patch. He would gather his corn stalks and tie them together into teepee-shaped shocks. The air began to cool and the maple trees would turn red, the oaks yellow. My father and I would rake the falling leaves into piles. Then I would jump in the crunchy heaps and pretend to be Joan of Arc burning at the stake. Before my father lit the piles, he would pull me out, shaking his head at my dramatics. As an adult, I moved out west, away from the vivid seasons of Michigan. Today I live in Arizona, where it is October 11 and still 100F degrees.

Time to carve pumpkins,

Halloween Jack O’Lanterns,

and swim in the pool.

My kigo (season) word is “pumpkin patch.” I wrote a haibun because I wanted to convey more information than I could in most syllabic forms. This is because of the contrast between the idea of the “Cold Dew” season and the reality of October 2023 in Phoenix, Arizona.

orange pumpkins on a field
Photo by Ekaterina Belinskaya on Pexels.com

57 Comments

Filed under #amwriting, #bloggingcommunity, #poetrycommunity, #TankaTuesday, Poetry, Syllabic Poetry, Writing

Tagged as , , , , ,

by | October 5, 2023 · 7:36 pm

Carol Balawyder Reviews Our Wolves

One of my favorite novelists, Carol Balawyder, has written a loooovely review of my chapbook Our Wolves. I am so grateful for her reading!!!

Luanne Castle: Our Wolves
Once upon a time /
Once upon a time / by Library of Congress is licensed under CC-CC0 1.0

Leave a comment

Filed under #OurWolves, #poetrycommunity, Book promotion, Book Review, Fairy Tales, Our Wolves, Poetry, Poetry book, Poetry Collection

Tagged as , , , , , ,

by | October 5, 2023 · 2:17 pm

Week 2 of the Autumn Equinox: #TankaTuesday

This is week two of The Autumn Equinox (September 22 – October 7) Shubun 秋分 for Colleen Chesebro’s new #TankaTuesday challenge based on the 24 Japanese seasons.

My kigo (season) word is Homecoming as in high school and college Homecoming events. This is one I have made up, but for me it represents mid-Autumn, the Autumn Equinox. I have a second kigo for a second poem. I used bonfire because although we had them both summer and fall, the fall ones were the ones that seemed magical, almost mystical.

I wanted to choose a syllabic form that is new to me, and I was intrigued by one that Colleen shared last time.

From the 24 Forms/kouta:

The kouta is a popular Japanese verse form of the Muromachi Period, 14th thru 16th century. They resurrected the lyrical song as a geisha song in the late 1800s and it’s still popular today. Koutas were originally meant to be sung out loud, like many other old forms of poetry. Techniques like assonance and consonance would fit right in with the form, but they aren’t required.

The kouta has several variations, though always short in only 4 lines a 5th line is sometimes is added. Themes reflect ordinary life and often use colloquialisms and onomatopoeia. The most popular are love songs. 

We write kouta in four lines but sometimes five, that tends to celebrate the average person’s everyday life in song. 

Colleen Chesebro

The kouta lines are always an odd number of syllables, usually 5 or 7 mixed, such as 7-5-7-5- or 7-7-7-5.

(untitled)

My son in a new black suit, (7)

daughter in semi-formal, (7)

their dates the first future glimpse. (7)

All are shiny smiles. (5)

Bring on Homecoming! (5)

(untitled)

One year we had a bonfire (7)

post our winning game. (5)

The smell of woodsmoke, night breeze, (7)

the high point before (5)

the descent toward winter. (7)

###

I looked up toward to see if it is one or two syllables. Two!

blaze bonfire campfire dark
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

43 Comments

Filed under #amwriting, #bloggingcommunity, #poetrycommunity, #TankaTuesday, Poetry, Syllabic Poetry, Writing

Tagged as , , , , ,

by | September 28, 2023 · 5:15 am

Date Harvesting for #TankaTuesday

Colleen Chesebro has created a new #TankaTuesday challenge based on the 24 Japanese seasons. The season right now is The Autumn Equinox (September 22 – October 7) Shubun 秋分.

My kigo (season) word is date because dates are harvested in Arizona only in the months of September and October. Here is my reverse etheree:

DATE HARVESTING

Under the leafy fronds of the date palms

the molasses-rich, honey-sweet fruit

hangs in heavy grape-like bunches.

Pickers with nets try to skim

whole bunches off the tree

without getting spiked

by fierce needles.

These sweet dates

are worth

risk.

smiling man holding branch with dates
Photo by Radwan Menzer on Pexels.com

###

Switching now from autumn to spring, I have an ekphrastic poem up at Visual Verse here: https://visualverse.org/submissions/paschal-moon-at-midlife/. You can see the artwork that inspired it also. Or you can read the poem here (and the link at my name goes to all the poems and stories I’ve had published at this site):

PASCHAL MOON AT MIDLIFE

Luanne Castle

Release yourself from heavy
coats and boots of winter,
wiggle the toes and sense the air
scouting your arms and calves.
Consider the mud puddle, slide
the long grass along your tongue.
Sing in response to the sweet-
sweet-sweet of the cardinal.
In darkness imagine your guide,
the moon a bountiful platter
mirroring pink phlox-covered hills
of your imagination. Relieve
your mind of artificial restraints.
Let it loose into the unknown.

41 Comments

Filed under #amwriting, #bloggingcommunity, #poetrycommunity, #TankaTuesday, Poetry, Syllabic Poetry, Writing

Tagged as , , , ,

by | September 9, 2023 · 10:51 am

“Tuesday Afternoon at Magpie’s Grill”

This post was originally published when I was thrilled to have a new poem up at Nine Muses Poetry. This poem was written about my occasional time spent writing poetry at Magpie’s and named, appropriately, “Tuesday Afternoon at Magpie’s Grill.” The journal is long-since out of business, but before that happened the editor, Annest Gwilym, nominated this poem for Best of the Net.

I decided to open my book Rooted and Winged with the poem because it fit so well my theme of the tension between the metaphorical desire to fly and our earth-bound lives.

Since the poem can no longer be found at the site of the journal, here it is:

Tuesday Afternoon at Magpie’s Grill

Flickering afternoon light slatted and parsed.

At 3PM, the booths empty except for me

and my notebook.

Would I notice if not for my companion,

my need to recognize and remember?

Without a record, will I hear the ice crashing

into the sink, the Dodger talk at the bar

at the end of the room under the Miller Lite

neon confident and beckoning?

My mother used to say about me,

In one ear and out the other, as if the words

flowed through me without stopping,

without truly entering me, leaving little

effect, as if I had no memory

of all the little parental transgressions.

Why am I not under the sycamore I spot

through the blinds in this Tuesday sunshine

listening to the very song with the shady tree?

What have I done with my life? When

I should have written a poem, I didn’t.

When I did, I didn’t get it quite right.

How can a poem do so many things:

wishing for the shade and thirsty for a beer,

feeling an urge to move my pen and noting

the tiny feet and brush of cuticle,

the solitary fly on my bare arm, while

imagining the chattering of the birds that swoop

from sycamore to jacaranda as if the parking lot

and dumpsters and broken bottles don’t exist.

No matter what I notice,

no matter what I record, I will never

capture the ease of wind-filled wings,

tail feathers a translucent backlit fan,

as my hollow bones jettison the detritus

to fly upward against the source.

21 Comments

Filed under #AmWriting, #writerslife, Poetry, Publishing, Writing

Tagged as , , , , , ,

by | September 6, 2023 · 5:15 am

Synonym Haiga #TankaTuesday

This week’s #TankaTuesday by Colleen Chesebro is to write a syllabic poem using synonyms of the words “quiet” and “seek.” I decided to try a haiga, although that is a little dangerous.

A haiga, in its original form, is a Japanese painting with a haiku in it. The text and image work together. The reason I think it’s “dangerous” for me to try this form is that my mixed media fun leans more abstract, so some people might not think this is a haiga. However, I am experimenting here because I like the idea of blending text and image.

I used “silence” for quiet (as a noun) and “pursued” for seek.

There’s a lot of truth in this haiga: we never really had a monsoon season this year, and yet it’s now September. How will we get to fall if we don’t have monsoons to shift the balance? We have to actively pursue fall by decorating with pumpkins and eating pumpkin ice cream.

pile of pumpkin
Photo by Ylanite Koppens on Pexels.com

70 Comments

Filed under #AmWriting, #writerlife, #writerslife, art journaling, Poetry, Writing, Writing prompt

Tagged as , , , , , ,

by | August 29, 2023 · 5:15 am

Impressionistic #TankaTuesday

This week’s #TankaTuesday by Colleen Chesebro is to write an ekphrastic syllabic poem inspired by a Berthe Morisot painting shared by Rebecca Budd on her blog Chasing Art. The painting is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Manet_on_the_Isle_of_Wight.

This Impressionist painting is in a French museum. I grew up going to the Art Institute in Chicago several times a year. While I’ve seen amazing Impressionist paintings at the Louvre and at the Courtauld in London, the Art Institute also has a gorgeous collection. My favorite painting there is by Caillebotte. Impressionism used to be my favorite style. Now my taste leans more toward Surrealism and Symbolism. Since I have been immersing myself in Surrealism by writing ekphrastic stories inspired by Remedios Varo, I really needed to zap myself into a different mentality first. So I ate some Ruffles and French onion dip. Get it? French chip dip, French painting.

I decided to write a tanka about the man in the painting who is the husband of the painter. I discovered that he was a painter himself, and the brother of the more famous Manet. He apparently was very supportive of his wife’s career as well as that of his brother. I found that to be very inspiring, especially since I am reading a novel about Varo’s life and how the male Surrealists treated the female painters. Not as colleagues.

Topic: Supportive Husband

My view is lovely

from our holiday quarters.

Better is this man

who places his career last

after his brother and moi.

53 Comments

Filed under #AmWriting, #writerlife, #writerslife, Poetry, Writing, Writing prompt

Tagged as , , , , ,

by | August 22, 2023 · 5:15 am

Summer Daisies #TankaTuesday

It’s been a long time since I wrote posts based on Dawn Raffel’s memoir, The Secret Life of Objects. The idea is to write about an object that evokes memories. 

I’ve blogged a couple of times about the vacation trip I went on with my parents when I wasn’t even four years old yet. We drove from Michigan south and visited Louisiana and Texas, among other states. Some of my most vivid memories from the time period were in New Orleans. I will always associate the city with sidewalk painters seated at their easels, the brushes that were extensions of their hands, and of course their fascinating canvases.

When I visited my mother in April to help her pack up some items before her move into the apartment building at her retirement village, I discovered this painting, long forgotten and gathering dust in Mom’s basement. My parents purchased it on that trip to New Orleans, and it hung for years in their living room. I shipped it home to myself, and now it hangs in my living room, reminding me of that vacation and the colorful, exciting world that existed outside Kalamazoo.

Colleen Chesebro’s prompt for #TankaTuesday is to use at least one kigo word in a syllabic poem for the current season, which in Arizona is summer. Colleen explains a kigo: 👉🏻 What is a KIGO? A kigo is a season word used in haiku and haibun (the haiku portion).

She provides a possible list of kigos. Daisies are not on the list, perhaps because many think of them as spring flowers. However, daisies are also summer flowers! So many types: Chrysanthemum*, Marguerite, English, Gloriosa, Shasta, Cape, Oxeye, and Gerbera. I prefer Gerbera because unlike the other varieties they are completely non-toxic to cats! *this variety is on Colleen’s list

Here is my haiku:

50 Comments

Filed under #AmWriting, #writerlife, #writerslife, Poetry, Writing, Writing prompt

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,

by | August 17, 2023 · 10:21 am

Should You or Should You Not Attend Your High School Reunion?

Photo is Detroit sunrise from Windsor, Canada.

My #TankaTuesday is at end of the post.

This past week I was in Michigan and Ontario (Canada). I got to see my mother, as well as some other relatives who I also saw in April. The main reason we chose last week to travel was to attend our high school reunion. Have you ever done that? This was my first one. The gardener and I went to the same high school, although he had been with those classmates for elementary and junior high, whereas I was the new girl in 10th grade.

Our reunion was put together sort of last minute by mainly one person who was helped by a few others. It was casual, held at a lakeside park. And maybe 15-20% of graduates attended. Although it would have been fun to have a big dressup party, I think this turned out best because people could move around easily–and best yet, we could hear each other talk. A dinner-dance isn’t the best place to catch up with people.

Although everyone there (except for two people who looked as if they have a nasty portrait of themselves hidden in the attic) looked older and in some cases unrecognizable, in general, I think my class has done pretty well with their appearances. It was really fun to catch up with some old friends and to talk to others I wasn’t as close to. In high school, it seems people rarely talk except to close friends.

An upside of going was that it was fun to “catch up,” and I realized I really care about the welfare of everyone I went to school with. We had a good time, and it was especially fun for the gardener to see people he went to school with for so many years. We also had a memory board with names and a memory candle so we could spend some brain and heart cells on those who are no longer with us.

A downside for me was that I didn’t know so many of the people we went to high school with. High school is not the best time to really get to know a large group of people. It’s also hard to see how old we have all become, although that is also an upside because it made me realize that these people are no longer the 17-year-olds I remember, but have had full lives with ups and downs just as I have had.

I’m not sure if this is a positive or negative, but I learned something about myself. Maybe that is really good, although it feels sad. When I was in school, I was quite shy, though not in a classic “quiet” way, but rather I found it very difficult to have poise in social situations. I didn’t have the confidence to participate in the activities I would have liked to, such as yearbook, journalism, and auditioning for plays. I would be too quiet when I should be more open to talking to others, and I would be noisy when with close friends. When I had openings or opportunities to do more, I assumed deer-in-headlights stance. Starting a new high school was very difficult for me, and add to that I had a lot of problems at home with my father during that time.

So what did I learn about myself from attending the reunion? Although I’ve gained in maturity, compassion, and confidence, I am still the same dummy in social situations. Too scared to initiate conversations, mind empty when I should have spoken, etc. Ugh. So, no, I guess people don’t really change although I thought I had.

My high school was known for being very cliquish, and we had a fair share of “mean girls” (not one of them was at the reunion). I only bring that up because my mother has her own social situation. She lives in a retirement community, in a large independent apartment building, and it too is cliquish. My mother is also an introvert (I think this gene is rampant on my maternal side). Is this what tends to happen in large social groups? Is it only the women or do men feel this, too?

On another note, I have a micro up at Scribes *MICRO* Fiction, thanks to Managing Editor Edward Ahern . It’s a surreal drabble (100 words). This link is for the whole issue, which is full of fun stories and poem. https://www.fairfieldscribes.com/issue-32.html/ My story is about 3/4 through the issue–if it were in pages it would be page 10 out of 13.

Here is how it begins:

These Days
​by Luanne Castle

​​​​I look over at the white Waymo as it pulls up next to us. The giant stuffed bear in the driver’s seat, its googly eyes stubbornly facing forward, refuses to glance at me.

For Colleen Chesebro’s weekly #TankaTuesday prompt about sunflowers, I offer this shadorma. The prompt includes a beautiful photo, but I couldn’t download it to use over here.

Garden Protection

Old-fashioned

gardens with bean plants,

corn, and squash,

tomatoes,

bloom with sunflower beauty,

cunning insect traps.

sunflowers and trees
Photo by Luca Barth on Pexels.com

70 Comments

Filed under #amwriting, #poetrycommunity, #TankaTuesday, Flash Fiction, Microfiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Writing

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,