be the water

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Today the WP Poetry Challenge kicks off with an invitation to create haiku about water using simile. Water being one of the topics of my current writing, I am especially grateful for the nudge to start gathering my thoughts and my focus. Which, as will be evident over time, is as multi-faceted as water itself. THIS is barely enough to get your feet wet…

Four short and one longer haiku-based poem. Enjoy and please remember, sharing feedback below is the best gift a reader can offer.

SUMMER IN MOTION
They scale slipp’ry stone
relentless as water falls
rolling them over.

FLOW
I seek an inner
fluidity not seen but
a way of seeing.

WRITING PROCESS
Words roll down the page
like water drops sliding off
a sea otter’s back.

RELEASE
Words erupt, geyser
like force splitting the silence
of still hard surface.

BE THE WATER!!
Curve ‘round the boulder,
turn to seek the level of
your greatest comfort.

Withdraw in the cold,
slow down, do not seek to speak
or travel far.

Water teaches us:
still too long, you foul the air,
self-satisfied stance.

Move too quickly, you
destroy the beauty you built
word by image, blur

color and form ‘til
nothing but mudslide, debris
remain of your work

like stormy ocean
destroying coastline once safe
with dune-anchored sand.

Take your time to sing,
meander, give permission
to sense – thus you live.

Through the seasons, you
measure growth through change, and change
through ongoing growth.

swb

minutes of love

8 days old

8 days old

Today’s WP Daily Post invites us to create and share a poem for someone we love.

Being a new grandmother, I jumped on the opportunity to combine three loves: for my son – and now his son – as well as for using poetry in service to expression.

The following two poems are in the form of a ‘Minute’ because they each contain 60 syllables. I first encountered this form in a poem by 2010 Poet Laureate of North Carolina, Cathy Smith Bowers (“How I Became an Existentialist”): three stanzas of 20 syllables, each stanza 8-4-4-4. [I have not rhymed my couplets, although that is part of the ‘official’ form.] Cathy discovered this form to contain and express her acute grief in the aftermath of her younger brother’s’ death. She says I believe that every moment of intensity is a moment inside some narrative.”

What better moment-in-a-narrative than these two minutes of love:

HOW I BECAME NANNY-GRAM
They knew he’d be a baby boy
and would be born
early this month,
my own birth time.

They asked what I’d like to be called
and quite simply
it came to me:
I’m Nanny Gram!

A compound name that lets me be
grandmother and
poet, sending
my love to him.

***

“NOT A MINUTE BIG”
So my mother was wont to say
of small houses;
and now I see
another place

for such a phrase: tiny newborn,
little peanut,
my son’s new son,
beautiful boy!

Not a minute goes by these days
without my thoughts
of him growing
bigger, and up.

swb