So much of any year is flammable, lists of vegetables, partial poems — Naomi Shihab Nye, from Burning The Old Year

and here's the match, here's the flint, here's the flat rock scratching against mountain stone, the friction needed for fire, the smallest spark arising on paper contact, a few words fluttering into nothing but thoughts on air: a poet, alone, with little more than the ash of an idea

for #verselove https://www.ethicalela.com/what-i-didnt-do/ https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48597/burning-the-old-year

How To Be A Blues Chord

Broken strings to start a song bend the neck on what's left At the crossroads, something's wrong but the remembering's the gift channel the passion of a hundred years dance a way to dissonance the flatted fifth brings on the tears what fretted fingers won't forget

for #verselove https://www.ethicalela.com/how-to-be/

On this morning, in April, in the moment when the rising sun embraces the distant sea: that's the poem I yearn to be

for #verselove https://www.ethicalela.com/succinct-truth-inspired-by-lucille-clifton/

It was over a delayed cup of coffee and a how-we-write chat, after you left the newspaper job I was still miserably at, that I followed you to your attic to find a loaned book, and had an eye-opening look at a ramshackle room of guitars amplifiers microphones speakers — neither knew the other played music; we were wordsmith creatures — and I made a choice to take a chance and blurted out the fact – that I had once played tenor sax; thirty years later, we're still rocking in a band, that day a coincidence or collision I can't quite understand

for #verselove https://www.ethicalela.com/choices-we-make/

One can't consider the weight of a raindrop until a flower petal baseball mitt catches a fly ball, then droops down to Earth

Gorgeous light, fading from a falling sun, lingers in the mirrored reflection, a wink of an eye like a lure, and then it's gone

Tanka Variations for #verselove https://www.ethicalela.com/tankas/

W hile E veryone praises the possibility of Fridays D igging their way into Saturdays — N ot me — I'm perfectly content and E venly balanced, smack dab in the middle, S traddling the hours before and after while D ancing on the echoes of laughter, together, A nd then shouting: Y ippee, as we tumble to the leeward side of the week

for #verselove https://www.ethicalela.com/why-thursday/

The sole snapped and as we laughed, I hobbled back: the flopping flipping beach-sand attack

for #verselove https://www.ethicalela.com/tumble-down-poetry/

Joy is a single leaf, falling, the ground caressing it, calling it with a rooted song of wonder; the leaf rests easy, now, settled on a brittled blanket of elders

for #verselove https://www.ethicalela.com/liberation-and-joy/

The rollers rocked the building, tiny earthquakes every day at dusk pm, with the news settling into record as black ink on borrowed paper, the words we wrote now plugged into place, and still, we'd smudge our tired fingers each following morning, if only to see our names, bolded, bound in story space

for #verselove https://www.ethicalela.com/the-news/#comments

Sometimes I just scattttttter

w

o

r d

s

like seeds – in hopes they form a poem

Sometimes, they

do do do do do | | |

for #verselove https://www.ethicalela.com/quirky-poems/