Posts: 751
Threads: 408
Joined: May 2014
Let's Pretend it's April - Nov. 26
Rules: Write a poem for LPiA on the topic or form described. Each poem should appear as a New Reply to this thread. The goal is to, at the end of the month, have written 30 poems for the month of November. (or one, or six, or fifteen) Prompts may be revisited at any time. All members are welcome.
Topic : Write a poem inspired by your hometown/state/country
Form : Any
Line requirements: 8 or more
Feel free to reply with comments or kudos as you wish.
Questions?
Posts: 489
Threads: 182
Joined: Jan 2013
Trilliums bud in earth wet by melted snow,
seeds spread last fall by dogs kicking stems
germinate in April’s first warmth.
The park is almost empty, two couples take photos
of the lake beyond the protective rail at the bluff,
a lone man smokes a joint on a bench by the birch.
I walk where I walked two decades ago,
the shortcut to the plaza through the woods.
Posts: 22
Threads: 0
Joined: Nov 2023
Your Hometown
Paris is cold this time of year,
its streets bathed in red wine and
stale cigarette smoke.
Raindrops fall—
always drum-drumming melancholia
on tight auvents over doors to cabarets
full of cancan girls with hairy armpits and rictus
smiles.
A wretched hole where
grumpy faces roam the boulevards,
voices murmuring in pretentious streams of French.
Everyone wearing black and white stripes,
onion necklaces, black berets
and carrying armfuls of baguettes—
all off to the Panthéon to sit at Voltaire’s tomb
and weep
then write poems about affairs, unrequited love
and ennui,
before returning home to slash and burn
a misunderstood painting or two,
as sugar melts into a glass of absinthe.
Posts: 894
Threads: 176
Joined: Jan 2021
Texas sinned.
I can’t tell you where
or when.
Might have happened when the Spanish were here.
But for sure it’s damned
and reaches out greedily
for the horsemen of climate change,
oil, guns and God,
it's true face lost in history.
Mostly the decades when my parents
were young marrieds, that I only know
through photographs. And the before that,
when Texas was a territory,
just broken hill country and plains and forest,
but plenty of Comanche.
Two boys went looking for a lost cow near Lampasas
and one was cornered by Comanche.
They told him to run and filled him with arrows
for fun. This was in 1872.
Lots of printed legends to simmer in when you know
no better than a child, and learn to read
in the paperback blaze of the 1960s
from Tolkien’s Middle Earth
to pulp fiction masters like Robert E. Howard
who gave us Conan the Barbarian
from out of the red hills an oil company rush
in the 1920s-1930s in Cross Plains
till he blew out his brains in 36.
But Texas has sinned
and simultaneously lost whatever
made it Texas. Now it’s a plate of armor
sewn to the shoulder of a raging giant.
Posts: 1,185
Threads: 250
Joined: Nov 2015
Takeoff
Seeming to sag between
Lake Erie and its namesake river
Ohio also anchors
Walter Mondale’s throw-away
“Rust Belt” of supposed
lands without hope or joy
forgetting in his high-nosed
losing anti-Reagan twang
a green heartland from which
the world took flight
(as, by happenstance, did I).
Non-practicing atheist
Posts: 751
Threads: 408
Joined: May 2014
Old Neighbors
He doesn't like them anymore;
supposes he never did.
But one weak voice
from a trailer park
on the edge of town
comes off as bitter--
no matter how sweet the speaker.
He says it's the unearned affluence
that nauseates him now--
walnut and granite
trampled by swine.
Before it's too late
he pawns mother's pearls
for a bottle of wine
and one last shot at nostalgia.
