2024 NaPM 22 April

[RiverNotch]

Rules: Write a poem for national poetry month on the topic or form described. Each poem should appear as a separate reply to this thread. The goal is to, at the end of the month have written 30 poems for National Poetry Month.

Write about a bone or set of bones.

[Mark A Becker]

A Natural Remedy

I wanted to tell you
what was troubling me
but got distracted
when a bird bounced
off the front window.

It was an ordinary jay
who appeared
to be OK
when I went outside
to check on it-

only momentarily startled-
it gathered its bones,
regained air, and flew away.
And now I’ve forgotten
what I first meant to say.

[Wjames]

Sunday afternoon at the pub
beside three regulars shooting the same shit
they sat down for a decade ago,
I think about the bones in their closets.

The Newfie is joking about a girl
with red hair he could have fucked
fifteen years ago on Signal Hill,
but his stomach was rumbling from ale
and he woke up in the brush
without his watch.

The man to his right laughs
before launching a diatribe against the force,
he says most cops are alright
but the union protects the bad apples
on paid leave for misconduct,
and his friend is a lawyer who defended a man
who spent ten years in prison
on a murder charge overturned
for planted evidence.

Beside me on the Newfie's left,
a man rises from the stool
stumbling towards stairs
he could amble down in a coma.

[dukealien]

Dicebones


Sheep did not miss their knucklebones
being dead and mostly eaten
but perhaps they gained some small
revenge from quarrels and losses
sprung from gamblers’ use of them
and knucklebones’ descendants
our familiar, numerated “rats and mice.”

[TranquillityBase]

An African American in a knitted cap
poses beside wooden stretcher
piled with the remains of soldiers
killed at Cold Harbor, bloody climax
to Lee’s long delaying action
to keep the dying Confederacy alive.

Five skulls are balanced atop the 
the mass of bone and rotted uniforms,
an errant leg, still clothed and booted
hangs off the stretcher, as though
it were trying to walk away from the scene.

In the background, four more workers
with shovels continue their task
digging up the shallow graves where
the dead had been hastily interred.

A glass window transparency that belies
the fury and bloodshed of those days,
a two week battle where neither side
could do much but kill each other.
Drained of color, yellow tinted
a tribute to a leftover Hell.

https://www.loc.gov/resource/ppmsca.35035/

[Mark A Becker]

Sheep did not miss their knucklebones
being dead and mostly eaten
but perhaps they gained some small
revenge from quarrels and losses
sprung from gamblers’ use of them

Never got into throwing dice, but these are a fascinating set of lines- I actually learned something. Thanks for that, duke

[RiverNotch]

Hmm....


I've had to handle the bones of many cats
for a class I once took, comparing
the anatomy of various vertebrates,
including our own. Since this was not a medical school,
there were no human specimens
in our collection: we had to use
ourselves for such examples.

I type, for instance, with my phalanges,
my carpals, my metacarpals,
even my radius and ulna, because
the various muscles that compose my hands
extend down to my arms, while I think
using no bones at all: the skull protects the brain
and nothing more.

The number of strays in our campus let
certain rumours spread
but what our professors always said
was that there was a farm upstate
and, to be fair, another department
spent an inordinate chunk of their pay
spaying and neutering the living among us,

albeit because the grounds were quite rural,
just behind our building, others were growing
taro, cabbage, and water spinach.