dogtrax

Listening In At Leontyne Price Musical Park

When Miss Price sang us that 'accomplishments have no color'

the air accompanied her as chords on a stage, her voice, an operatic echo

of streets hummed as aria; the city, as orchestra; this park; as chance for change

inspired by #nwp Write Across America (SMWP) https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/c324b4c832bf9e9f1db8174bcf94c402/laurel-virtual-writing-marathon-smwp/index.html

Respair (hope over despair)

When wrestling over emotion, RE- meets DE- and the crowd cheers from the seats with noise in our ears and hope, as belief

Inspired by an exploration of the word in The Cabinet of Calm (Soothing Words for a Troubled World) by Paul Anthony Jones

Eating ain't the only thing we dig in to at Miss Pearl's on Oak and Magnolia

We marvel at the woman behind the counter, too, the gumption it took

to imagine a diner at seventy, and to see it through, too,

so we're not just nibblin' on catfish, we're celebrating what it takes to make one's way

from there to here

inspired by #nwp Write Across America (SMWP) https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/c324b4c832bf9e9f1db8174bcf94c402/laurel-virtual-writing-marathon-smwp/index.html

Of stale crumbs and nimble bones, these stories we leave in dirt and dust, the zany crazy echoes of endless rust; in the end, every poem sits alone

for #ds106

Memory’s a mad curve-ball - stitching off the fingers - its lightning, sticky, lingers

We’re all bunting dingers into these fields of play, then rounding home - or remembering the trying - as if there’s any other way

inspired by a roll of Taylor Mali's Metaphor Dice

You surely know, too, that time before the hummingbird sips:

you hear the sound when gravity dips inside the ear -

such thrumming, that wingbeat drumming -

and all it takes is movement to make the moment disappear

Someone - probably me - forgot the poem left in the pocket of the pants put in the wash maybe not just once but two or three times so now the paper's permanently folded, words molded together along the corner seams, so it's lucky someone - probably me - recalls the first lines of the poem now stuck together, the trapped lines still flow so easily

The dent blue Subaru arrived home, north to New England, last night, all right, with dead cicadas in the grill

sometimes, even the dead end up where they will

Redamancy (for love)

We may never finish this game of petals from the daisies we discovered together, so that even in crazy weather, our lives, tangled in troubles, forgot, I hold to the possible forever bloom of “she loves me” and never, “she loves me not”

Inspired by an exploration of the word in The Cabinet of Calm (Soothing Words for a Troubled World) by Paul Anthony Jones

You’re rolling off the tongue, tumbling towards the ground,

then gathering steam with other drops; this gravity drags you down

down, you go down, you flow down beyond my view

here, on river’s edge, you disappear, the last I’ll see of you

Inspired by this site https://river-runner.samlearner.com/