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  • Definitions

    Latin_dictionary

    Definitions

    Break is a word
    That kicks at the end,
    With legs of a K
    Severing ties,
    Though it begins
    With a buxom, promising B.

    Break can be rest,
    Pause measured by coffee,
    Perhaps in class,
    Perhaps at the office,
    A siesta of sorts
    As darkness drops in.

    Break is a verb
    Employed against horses,
    Stomping spirits,
    Rupturing traditions,
    Punting friends,
    Into dangerous orbits.

    Mend is a word
    That fixes the break,
    That sets the bone,
    That patches the hole.
    Mend offers a hand
    And does not let go.

    How is the adverb,
    How is the work.

    Draft, Susan Thomsen 2025

    *****

    A month ago the Poetry Sisters offered a challenge for February: to create a "__ Is a Word" poem, a form invented by Nikki Grimes and shared by Michelle Barnes. (Thank you to Tanita S. Davis for the background.) The above, a very rough draft, is what I came up with. Should I keep the last two lines or set them free?

    The Poetry Friday roundup for February 28th is at Denise Krebs' blog.

    Image: Latin dictionary photo by Dr. Marcus Gossler, used under the license Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

  • “After the Winter,” Claude McKay

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    Thank you to Claude McKay (1889-1948) for the following and its title, both of which remind me that one day we'll be done with this interminable winter season. There will be an "after." Bring on the droning bees and the ferns! (See also  Yeats's "Lake Isle of Innisfree" for more bees.) I found the McKay at poets.org, the site of the Academy of American Poets, and it is in the public domain. The Poetry Friday roundup today is at author Laura Purdie Salas's blog. Edited to add: don't miss Tanita Davis's look at McKay's "If We Must Die" over at her place, Fiction, Instead of Lies.

    *****

    After the Winter

    by Claude McKay 

    Some day, when trees have shed their leaves
        And against the morning’s white
    The shivering birds beneath the eaves
        Have sheltered for the night,
    We’ll turn our faces southward, love,
        Toward the summer isle
    Where bamboos spire to shafted grove
        And wide-mouthed orchids smile.

    And we will seek the quiet hill
        Where towers the cotton tree,
    And leaps the laughing crystal rill,
        And works the droning bee.
    And we will build a cottage there
        Beside an open glade,
    With black-ribbed blue-bells blowing near,
        And ferns that never fade.

     

    Photo by Susan Thomsen

  • A Poem by Patricia Spears Jones

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    Here is a poem by Patricia Spears Jones, whose work I have admired ever since reading her piece in the 1994 anthology Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café. This one is called "Comedy with Flutes," and it was first published in 2023. The Poetry Foundation link includes audio. Do take a listen! I'm adding "Comedy with Flutes" to my own "Resistance" collection. It begins,

    Enough of this foolishness—caution gone
    She opined
    We need a comedy with flutes

    Happy Black History Month, happy Valentine's Day, happy Poetry Friday. The roundup is at the blog TeacherDance. 

    Photo by Susan Thomsen, 2019.  @ellestreetart mural, part of the @streetartmankind project. New Rochelle, New York.

  • A Jane Hirshfield Poem

    No doubt someone has shared this poem on Poetry Friday before; it's such a good one. I'm still working on my own poems, made of words from headlines in the New York Times. Right now they are coming out really angry, and whether that speaks to the zeitgeist, my own frame of mind, or both, I couldn't tell you! I'm trying to get at my own form but haven't yet arrived. I did realize that unlike headline writers, I wasn't limited by space constrictions, so that let me cut out and paste in some "a"s, "the"s "and"s, and so on. 

    I like the repetitions, word choices, and arrangement of white space in this Hirshfield  poem. She has found her own form, and I'm reminded how important it is to read mentor works. That "we" in "Let Them Not Say" keeps us readers on the hook.

    The Poetry Friday roundup for February 7th is at Carol Varsalona's Beyond Literacy Link.

    Thanks to the Academy of American Poets for its Instagram account, where I found "Let Them Not Say."

  • Cat Haiku

    All purrs, she joins me
    On the couch for a minute
    Spreading her good vibes.

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    This is Kimchi, one of my resident muses. She's a small cat and a big character.

    The Poetry Friday roundup is at The Miss Rumphius Effect.

  • Nightmare

    Nightmare

    Tiny burning embers
    Blazes
    Fire weather
    Warnings/increased
    Forced evacuations
    LA girds
    Location, size, containment, and more

    Monster winds

    Fire’s massive scale
    What do you pack?

     

     

    Source: The Los Angeles Times, accessed 9 January 2025

    *****

    I made this found poem from words and phrases in headlines and subheadings in the LA Times. I wanted to keep it brief. I'm so worried; we're all so worried. See Time's "How to Help Victims of the Los Angeles Wildfires."

    The Poetry Friday roundup for January 10th is at Kathryn Apel's blog.

    No image today.

  • Rumors and Lies

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    Using ideas from last week, I created another new poem using headlines from the Sunday New York Times. I'll let it speak for itself. Again I thank the late Lorraine O'Grady for the inspiration.

    For 2025 I am fortifying myself with, among other things, Year of Wonder: Classical Music to Enjoy Day by Day, by Clemency Burton-Hill. She offers a short essay and music recommendation for each day of the year. Perhaps this will lead to some poems? Who knows!

    The last Poetry Friday roundup for 2024 is at Michelle Kogan's More Art 4 All. Word Press bloggers, I apologize that my comments on your blogs do not show up; for some reason, they sometimes disappear into the ether.

  • Lorraine O’Grady

    Here's a short feature in the Yale Review from a few years back. It concerns the work of the conceptual artist/critic/essayist Lorraine O'Grady, who died last week at the age of 90. Eugenia Bell writes,

    "Her 1977 work, Cutting Out the New York Times, consists of twenty-six poems made from cut up Sunday editions of the newspaper. Forty years later, she has reimagined and reshaped the original works into twenty-six “haiku diptychs” in Cutting Out COTNYT."

    Because of copyright issues, I'm not going to include any images of O'Grady's haiku diptychs, but you can see them at the Yale Review's website, linked above. These pieces and their predecessors look like good mentor poems to use in creating one's own work. Y'all know I can't resist a good process experiment, so my effort is below.

    The Poetry Friday roundup for December 20th is at Jone Rush MacCulloch's blog.

    Hat tips: Yale Review Bluesky account; ARTNews obituary

     

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    "Weather Report" ©Susan Thomsen, 2024

    Source: The New York Times, Dec. 15, 2024

  • The Familiar Angels of Handel’s ‘Messiah’

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    Messiah (Christmas Portions)
     
    by Mark Doty
     
    A little heat caught
    in gleaming rags,
    in shrouds of veil,
       torn and sun-shot swaddlings:
     
       over the Methodist roof,
    two clouds propose a Zion
    of their own, blazing
       (colors of tarnish on copper)
     
     

    ****

    Here is a link to Mark Doty reading and talking about the poem on PBS. It's a lovely segment—with singing! Also, if you like choirs and choral music, you might enjoy Stacy Horn's book Imperfect Harmony: Finding Happiness Singing with Others.

    The Poetry Friday roundup for December 6th is at Carol Labuzzetta's blog, The Apples in My Orchard.

  • Seasonal Verse

     

    http://tanitasdavis.com/wp/​

    I loved this poem when it popped up on Instagram the other day. There are so many footsteps I'd love to hear again, even the early-morning clomps of my mom's Dr. Scholl's sandals as I tried to sleep late way back when. Or the squeaks of our sneakers as my friends and I played basketball in the YWCA gym in my hometown. The soft, pink-padded galloping of my old cats chasing each other in a tiny apartment. November and, to a lesser extent, October are wistful months, and Crapsey's poem taps into that.

    The Poetry Friday roundup for November 29th is at the lovely Tanita S. Davis's blog Fiction, Instead of Lies.