PoretryPlace Blog 65 So Where’s the Blog?
We got a little busy here this past month. Had to forego a few weeks of bloggery.
Some medical issues and testing kept us occupied full time for a number of days. Sparing you the not-so gory details, we are both okay now.
I took advantage of the dreary hours of worry and uncertainty in hospital waiting rooms to get in some reading time. Often, this goes: read a few pages, worry, nod off, read a few pages, look up at the television, worry, try to find some coffee, read a few more pages . . . . Not this time. While the worry factor remained in the back of mind, Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” kept me turning page after page.
The book took the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and two years later was made into a motion picture. It is a story without chapters that moves relentlessly in McCarthy’s direct, arresting, unconventional style. It keeps coming at you. It is relentlessly desperate. It is relentlessly hopeful. At the end, I was exhausted. If you have not read it, read it.
I spent some time submitting my work for publication. I sent a few poems to Contemporary Haibun Online. They accepted one. It is in the current (October 2014) issue. Check out the website:
www.contemporaryhaibunonline.com if you would care to read it or other great haibun.
Encouraged by this acceptance, I sent three more haibun to Rattle poetry magazine for their spring 2015 Tribute issue to Japanese poetic forms. I’ll have to wait a couple of months to see how that goes.
Then there was MeccaFest, the juried arts and crafts show at the Carrollton Cultural Arts Center, last Saturday and Sunday. We gawked and shopped and bought some unusual items as gifts and for our own use. There are also live performances on the outdoor stage, mostly musical talents. Members of the Carrollton Creative Writers Club were asked to read some of their short works to fill time between acts. I read both days. In case you missed it, as nearly everyone in Carrollton did, here is one of the Silverstein-esk pieces I chose for the Saturday readings. It is titled Your Pick.
When it comes to your face
You might want to erase
The assemblage
You got from your parents.
You don’t get your druthers
Your chin is your mothers
And happy or sad, eyes
And ears are your dads.
You can’t make the selection
Of which direction your tongue
Sticks out of your mouth
But you do get to pick
Your own nose.
Sunday, I got a little more serious and read a couple of my recently penned (I actually use pencil) seasonal haibun. Here is one with a taste of autumn, titled County Roads.
Open fields on the outskirts of our small town near the western Georgia border have lain fallow and unworked for generations. Weathered gray barns and sheds, dilapidated reminders of distant days, teeter precariously alongside the rural byways. The land seems to sing with subdued voices of the past—black workers bent over dry, prickly cotton bolls on a hot August afternoon; echoes of the gee and haw of a farmer guiding his mules and plow.
Late on dusky autumn evenings, small rafters of wild turkey emerge into the long shadows of the surrounding woodlands to scavenge barren fields. Ravens gather to conspire in the dimming light of day. And slowly, silently nature reaches out to reclaim her rightful providence.
black birds bob and strut
on rusted tin roofs, below
only goldenrod
So our days spin on, one to the next, moving uncertainly to a certain fulfillment, like the man and the boy in “The Road,” ever circumspect, ever mindful, step after faltering step, ever hopeful.
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