2019 November PAD Chapbook Challenge: Day 1
For today’s prompt, write a once upon a time poem.
Category: Poetic Bloomings
Apple Pie Ice Cream Dream
Written for Poetic Bloomings Prompt # 193
WE ALL SCREAM: Pick a favourite flavour as your inspiration and use it as the title of your poem. Points for making up your own flavour! Bonus points if your poem actually has nothing to do with ice cream!
I stretched it a little. And added a cat. Because . . . well . . . cats and ice cream . . . even though my poem has nothing to do with cats.
Apple Pie Dream
a red white and blue sky morning
a cuppa and another
cuppa down the hatch, Jack
newsreels reeling, airwaves crackling
another red white and blue stars and stripes
up in smoke mad world spinning on FIRE
out of love with Lady Liberty
Lady reporter sings in her mic,
we’re all gonna die, we’re all gonna die
world sinkin’ into a mire of fear
tears tumble inside the empty tide
where standin’ right there right
inside the sea right
inside a wave of grief
39 signers with inky fingers
holding up a parchment of gold
(safe and sound)
tonight’s delight—
a Grand Canyon dipper (or two)
of apple pie dreamy creamy à la pro patria
nestled inside one giant melting pot (or two)
it’ll be a cozy night
a gonna take it slowly night
for mom and baseball
for mustangs and rodeos
for James Fennimore, Twain, and Poe
under a blue moon of dreams.
A Weekly Haiku
Poetic Bloomings served up a challenge to write a week of haiku, highlighting a week of days in a string of seven haiku. Anything is fair game, so I wrote what happens (and has happened) every day of every week of every month for the past four or five years. My dad’s health is poor. My mom has Alzheimer’s. Their days are like the movie Groundhog Day. The same ol’ same ol’.
Here’s my offering for “WHAT A WEEK IT WAS!”
THE DAILY CALENDAR
by J.lynn Sheridan
DAILY
Old sergeants wrestle.
Against time and providence.
Playing hide and seek.
He prays for heaven
Weary of daily battles
The sunrise cheats him.
She prays to go home.
Lost inside her tangled mind.
Asking her own name.
Another phone call.
Another question of time.
Searching the shadows.
Remembering 1953
White lace and diamonds.
Home sweet home and hearth to hearth.
Her beauty thrilled him.
NIGHTLY
A flirt with morning
Lost dreams teasing me.
Insomnia’s gift
Neighbor’s chickens squawk.
Red fox prowler on the hunt.
Thieves hide everywhere.
Every Life Needs its Own Mirror
I’m sharing a pantoum that I wrote yesterday for a prompt from the site formally known as Poetic Bloomings. The amazing poets who contribute to this site have recently voted in a new name: Creative Bloomings because the founding administrators, Walt Wojtanik, Marie Elena Good, and fellow contributing poets are now incorporating flashy fiction and photography and more. Michelle Hed was our guest prompter.
And here is the prompt:
Complete this thought and make that thought the title of your poem.
“Every life needs its own______________”
“Every life needs its own mirror”
(a pantoum by J.lynn Sheridan)
Every life needs its own burnished mirror
to peer into the far-flung past.
A tool to reflect our trodden paths,
whether wise, resolute, or marred.
To peer into the far-flung past,
then disclose our truths and errs.
Whether wise, resolute, or marred,
Echo-casting of years yet unknown.
Then, disclose our truths and errs
so the future repeats each mended rove.
Echo-casting of years yet unknown,
every life needs its own burnished mirror.
+++
You try!
The Rules for a pantoum are fairly simple.
From Poets.org:
“The modern pantoum is a poem of any length, composed of four-line stanzas in which the second and fourth lines of each stanza serve as the first and third lines of the next stanza. The last line of a pantoum is often the same as the first.”
No rhyming!
Now, it’s your turn. Don’t forget to visit Creative Bloomings for more inspiration.
The Nasher
Sounds a little wonky, doesn’t it?
A Nasher?
RJ Clarken over at Poetic Bloomings introduces us to the Nasher.
(I keep thinking it’s some kind of Irish Potato. A combo of bangers and mash, perhaps.)
RJ writes, “According to John Drury in his The Poetry Dictionary, a Nasher is, ‘a light-verse form, invented by Ogden Nash, in which lines ranging from very short to extremely long *rhyme comically in* couplets.’
It’s basically a license to write anything poetic that you wish, just so long as the lines (in couplet form) end in end-rhyme or even wrenched end-rhyme.”
Here’s my attempt:
“Lessons from a miser on triple-couponing”
According to parsimonious Everett McPrudent
no one ever graduates from grocery-shopping student
to teacher to expert to grand master of the coupon
(Pardon me, would you happen to have any Grey Poupon?)
without acquiring one of life’s finer pleasures,
(vastly overrated, but of course a great treasure)—
The free procurance of Baluga gray caviar (fragile, defiled)
respectfully espied in the bargain-basement aisle.
Due to the government shutdown . . .
Written for Poetic Blooming’s First Ever Poetry Contest.
You have until the end of the month to enter your poem
to win a copy of Robert Lee Brewer’s new poetry book,
Solving the World’s Problems.
Writing On The Sun 