Burn: April PAD - Day 19

REFINED

It happens when you’ve been rubbed the wrong way.
It’s simple physics: building friction, harmful diction, sparks may fly.
Tension and confrontation pound with the potential to be abstergents
for your character, if you so chose.
Baptism by fire fissures into a schism where you must decide
who you are: burned and scarred, refined and cleansed, pained or marred.
The flame lacks mercy, discernment, and phlegmatic disposition,
but your burn carries the memory of hurt, healing, and action.
Let it smart till your heart finds the salve it needs.
Let it burn till the flame no longer breathes.


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How are you doing with your poem-a-day journey? I have been writing, but offline. Sorry I haven't kept you all in the loop, but you're getting to read the best ones.

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I write about fire a lot. Do you think this would be a good theme for a collection?

In Case of: April PAD - Day 11

In Case of Heat

This heat between us
curls up, asleep in its turmoil
blowing spits of recycled air
at our toes. This heat manages
a space that should not exist
between the narrow flanks of a single bed,
but yet weighted we boil, stirred by
a breeze conditioned to burrow
and tarnish the hollow ground
on which we totter.
This heat beats our words
in a tongue-race, pushing silence
and miscommunication into our night
time prayers, blanketed with layers of
the unsaid --snug, content, complacent--
it lies here between our backs
as they face each other a bedtime standoff
after a passive disagreement, though we
should not call it that. The heat allows
no combat or fireworks to identify
where there may be bleeding,
but blood is here, sweltering between
our parallel spines as this unbearable heat
conceals our withdrawn weapons in sweaty sheets
and releases murmurs about the morning maintenance.
The heat reveals no fix this malady, no wrench
to lessen this wedge, no ice to calm its destruction.

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So much catching up to do!

Love of Poetry

Happy National Poetry Month! It has been a week of poetry reading and writing and revelry. I hope you have been enjoying the increased awareness and poetic events in your local communities. Shout outs to Serena at http://savvyverseandwit.com/ for orchestrating this blog tour.

I used to get annoyed with people who said that they don't like poetry, that poetry doesn't make sense to them. I wondered how they saw the world and questioned their ability to appreciate beauty. Ok, fine, I still do that sometimes, but most of the time I realize it's not my concern. There's beauty in small moments like the fluttering of a baby's eyelids as he wakes up, or the struggle of a monarch butterfly during its emergence, or the simple recognition of love in another person's eyes. Poetry highlights these gems of life in language that speaks to my heart. For the love of poetry, enjoy this love sonnet by Pablo Neruda:

XVII (I do not love you...)

Pablo Neruda

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep

An editorial note by Leslie Pockell postulates that the love he speaks of in this poem is what he experienced with his third wife, Matilde Urrutia. "Something passionate and profound, but also easy and natural...." What speaks to me is the reality in a solid reality, words that aren't inflated, words that are accurate, words that create an exact image. Sure, I'm a sucker for love poems, but I especially like ones that begin "I do not love you..."

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What kind of poetry speaks to you?