It is October, which means that it is OctPoWriMo, a poetry writing month. I can’t write one a day this month, but the special month itself did encourage me to write one this weekend using inspiration from the Plath Poetry Project.
Burningword Literary Journal has published my poem “Elegy.” This poem is on a solo ride with emotion and maybe shows a bit of my love of Sylvia Plath poetry (it is not the poem I wrote this weekend) and for fairy tales.
For those who don’t realize, an elegy is a type of poem. It is a lament for someone who has died or something that is lost. Anything described as elegiac is mournful.
Are you going to write a poem or more this month?
In honor of OctPoWriMo, I am offering HALF PRICE on any poetry consulting that begins in the month of October.
On May 6 I posted about a poem I wrote for a friend who recently passed away. I had written the poem during #napowrimo. Today I am sharing the poem with you. I don’t plan to send it out. Writing it was the most important experience.
However, it has been shared with others. It turns out her husband loved it and published it as the poem for the pamphlet at Nancy’s Celebration of life. The title refers to Nancy’s way of saying goodbye, whether in person or on phone or by email. And for cards and gifts she used to wish “light and love.”
You Are Loved
We were sketches
you colored in with
your box of Crayolas
You were the model
we studied for vision
You were a guidebook
we the letters in line
You were music we
turned up on the dash
You were a disciple
You were the doyen
You were walks with
trees and caterpillars
You were the one
whose arms reached
around the universe
and whispered in one
word sentences because
each one was enough
light
love
###
Live this life in light and with love. No comments please.
This poem features my dad’s Sunfish sailboat, which we sailed on our little lake in the 60s and early 70s.
The Sunfish on Eagle Lake
Dad bought it used, but only gently so. We put more miles on that boat in the first summer than it had accumulated with its previous owner. Dad and I were calm and talked little when we sailed together. When my best friend and I took it out our goal was to sail past the docks of the boys with the big motorboats. It was when my cousin Leah came from Chicago to visit that the boat’s potential for capsizing was realized.
