Showing posts with label National Poetry Month. Show all posts
Showing posts with label National Poetry Month. Show all posts

Monday, April 24, 2023

Life Lessons for a Poet

 

Read one good poem a day.

Look up.

For every negative thought, think three positives. Because this life hurts too much already.

Duct tape your ugly mouth.  You are amazing and stop saying otherwise.

When all else fails, pray.

Everything will fail.  Pray.

Think of the children.

Talk a walk in nature.  Breathe it in.  Don’t forget what you learned there.

Remember: someone needs you.

Remember: you need, too.

Write, damn it.  That’s how you know what you need to know.  It’s your gift.  To yourself.

 

© 2023 Jennifer Wagner

 

Thursday, April 27, 2017

Thank You, April



April, I am starved for light,

bring a little, please,
to the window

where I can see summer
lolling about the hills afar off.

Ah, yes, I see her now,
shoeless in leaves of grass,
picking blackberries,
Sonnet 18 nearing couplet.

April, you’re a long way from summer,
but at least I can see her from here.


© 2017 Jennifer Wagner


“Distinctive realms appear to us when we look and hear by poem-light.” - Jane Hirshfield, Ten Windows.  Happy Poetry Month with appreciation to poems by Sandburg, Heaney and Shakespeare.  

Friday, April 1, 2016

Like Spent Cherry Blossoms


Milling about
the door,

while the garden lights
were swaying

and the moon was high,

this poem
found itself

arriving,

sweet spices
on rainpetal skin

from spring's unfurling trees.

And what was I to do, little poem?

Of course, I swept you in.



© 2016 Jennifer Wagner



Happy National Poetry Month! :-)

dVerse OLN
 

Tuesday, April 7, 2015

Dear April



image © 2015 Jennifer Wagner,
photo of my home calendar

You don't fool me. Though
you start off that way.

Yes, you slosh rain
from infinity buckets,
but you smile
just the same
from the ground up--
jelly bean tulips and buttery daffodils
springing round
like long-lost jewels.

And even though it's time
for the bogey-tax-man,
you balance him
with a month of poetry
and the crack
of a bat and Big League Chew
(Original, Grape, Sour Apple, and Watermelon!).

So, you're not really fooling me, April,
as much as you think you are.

T.S. Eliot said you are
the cruelest month,” but
at least more often than in March,
there is guaranteed
one Good Friday
and a Resurrection reminder
(coming back from the dead
really can't be beat).

Plus, your flower is the daisy (my favorite)
or the sweet pea,
which always reminds me
of the song my dad would sing,
Oh, Sweet Pea, come on and dance with me . . .”
riding along with him in his truck--

after which he'd switch it off
to bellow into the CB,
breaker 1-9, this is Gladiator.”
No one's dad is as
cool and tough as a Gladiator, right?

So,
you don't fool me, April.
I think you kind of like me.


P.S. I kind of like you, too.


© 2015 Jennifer Wagner



And, Happy National Poetry month!

Monday, April 7, 2014

Paper Mosaics



image by cohdra

 

Poems are
stained paper mosaics,

words
picked up
on the journey,
dismantled proverbs
set

in the window glass
of personal palaces
and in the stepping stones
of personal ghettos;

broken tile stories
crafted

with more blood
than it looks.



© 2014 Jennifer Wagner


Happy National Poetry Month!

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

The Carbon Dioxide (of Poetry)


when all the shapes of dreams
flew by outside your window

and you couldn’t catch one
to call your own,

when every
gnarly, blighted

branch of life’s undoing
rotted right up through your soles,

those pieces of poems called out,
laying dormant in blades of nevermind grass,

for you to crawl
across the grit of unholy floors,

to find grace through
time-smudged glass

and see them
beneath the soil, coiled

and waiting for you
to breathe them into birth

 

Copyright © 2013 Jennifer Wagner
 

A sort of tribute to poetry itself, as it is National Poetry Month, and how poets are given poetry and with it the ability to turn pain into art.