This weeks prompt as we as we head towards Anzac Day is “Remember”
Please send poetry this week to:
poemoftheday.jaxton@gmail.com
Cheers
Jeanie
And today’s quote:
Month: April 2018
Ballad of the Boots
Son to Mum
My boots are made for sleeping
I’ll never take them off again.
My feet are made for keeping
Those leathery brown boots.
My heart is made for boots
They are the world to me
& if you take them off me Mum
I’ll scream the whole house down.
My boots they sing me songs
As the crackle in the night
My heart is made for weeping
For my hand-me-down brown boots.
Mum to Son
Son, I wish you’d take off those boots
For they are lethal weapons as you sleep.
I know you love them deeply, truly, madly
But they do not make your parents
Meet the morning mildly mannered.
If you stayed asleep on your own bed
We’d have no problems with your obsession,
But as you creep up into ours
I’d rather your boots were dreams
& not your midnight possession
Boots to Son
When you grow up you won’t remember
the love that we once shared.
But that’s okay I won’t be lonely because
I always travel in pairs.
I just have one small request before I go
Please polish me & check my eyelets
Then sing me a song to imprint into my sole.
Boots to Mum
One day he’ll be fully grown
& new shoes he’ll own
Boots will be replaced by runners
new challenges be found.
Remember you can write a poem
to reach out to him
Say the things you need to say
as Mum to grown up son.
(c) June Perkins
Country Boys and Country Girls
A song lyric
Country boys and country girls
dream more than sugar cane.
Country boys and country girls
want more than endless rain.
They’re picking stars from skies above.
They’re catching pieces of the moonlight.
They’re running to the canopies
of light.
Country boys and country girls
often hide their pain
but they’re still holding
onto all their dreams
looking into the firelight
to find the global streams.
They’re picking stars from skies above
They’re catching pieces of the moonlight
They’re running to the canopies of light.
Country boys and country girls
often leave these towns
‘cause when the pickings done
there’s too few jobs around
and when a cyclone’s been
it’s even harder still
but now they’ve just got to
have a stronger will.
So they’re leaving behind the sugar cane
they’re saying goodbye
to endless rain
And they’re still looking
for the canopies of light.
Country boys and country girls
they’ve long left these towns
and now they’re longing
for that precious rain,
picking up the pieces of their lives
dancing under starlit skies.
They’re dreaming of the sugar cane
and they’re longing for the precious rain
and they’re still looking
for the canopies of light.
They’re picking stars from skies above.
They’re catching pieces of the moonlight.
They’re running to
the canopies of light.
(c) June Perkins
Dust
“We cherish the hope that through the loving-kindness of the All-Wise, the All-Knowing, obscuring dust may be dispelled and the power of perception enhanced, that the people may discover the purpose for which they have been called into being.” Tablets of Baha’u’llah, Ṭarázát (Ornaments)
Dust
obscuring
covering
settling
coating the everyday of the soul in
a thickening mantle of swirling
loss, regret, anxiety, confusion
Questions
Surround
impound
confound
and then
Astound
Divine breeze
released by spiritual words
chanted, sung or said into
Air
becoming light through melody
and memory
beyond dust
Peeling away veils
Visible for a moment
the sense of the soul’s shape
free falling
into
faith, connected, certitude
unfurling
feathered tips of wings
Then air filter light warning
the arrival of
more dust . . .
(c) June Perkins
Literature Bird – Write Me a Poem
Literature Bird, by Geson Rathnow
This bird of paper and feathers
sings, ‘Write me a poem
make me from words or letters
on my body like
grans
mer att.
Perhaps imagine
my textures
stone, feather
paper maiche
and find poetic
ways to make someone feel me
through your words.
Maybe you love shape poems
and will make you poem
just like a wing
or a feather.
Maybe think of other literature
birds
like Edgar Allan Poe’s Raven
or a sparrow with Thumbelina
or a bird that your gran likes?
Maybe I am nothing like those birds
or perhaps I am just the same?
Compare me.
Do you know a famous poet
who likes to call for me everyday?
Perhaps we can have a conversation?
Perhaps you could imagine how I might
sing.
Does my bird song sound like this att att
mer mer?
Do you have a chorus for me,
View original post 207 more words
Raining Poetry
Grey and White
Grey and white streaks
begin to lace themselves
through my hair.
I embrace
the signs of wisdom
chasing through me there,
And all around me others
dye and tease their hair
to conceal their age
but that is their affair.
I don’t mind that they want to do this
and hold onto their esteem
but why does one say to me
‘You should dye your hair
you look so ancient and so old’
I explain to her
‘when I was younger
I looked younger than my age
and am happy to embrace
the white and grey that now
dance through my life.’
She cannot take a hint
and simply doesn’t understand
I don’t need a bottled colour
to conceal the process I’m now in
and now she wants to know
the colour of my youth.
Why do so many worship
forever staying young?
I am happy to see silver starlight
in my hair.
It doesn’t make me blue
to become an ancient woman
with an ancient wisdom.
When did aging gracefully
become so easily scorned
and not needing a disguise
become so fervently despised?
I take the process of my life
and seek an inner dye
where my soul’s forever dancing
outside my body’s time.
(c) June Perkins, words
Paper Boats
Paper boats conjure dreams
of petals soaked by
scents of the
ocean.
Traveling boats
float in shadows
people
who have a simple hope
for happy lands,
but white markers sink
in sandy earth
marking graves of people
who cannot resist new germs.
‘Once watched paper boats,’
paternal grandfather says
in Vietnamese
but nobody understands
No translators here.
So shadow puppets dance
for petals
falling from kumquat boughs.
(c) June Perkins
Cyclone Inspired Poetry 3
If Glass Could Talk
for Jacque
If only all the tiny shards of glass
bottle brown
wine green
yellow and purple orchid swirls
could talk.
What would they say
if fragments realigned
knit themselves back together
like broken bones entwined in casts
and heroes walked?
What if the paralyzed
could miracle embrace
pain and grief
trauma and loss
till they walked with stars?
I breathe out Vincent’s starry night
from living room wall
to outside door
then coffee table book on my floor
I wonder – would he obsess about lost socks
from cyclone’s past?
(c) June Perkins, Words and Image
Requiem
I regularly read the poetry at this blog. Thanks Robert for your inspiration.
Requiem
That it begins.
And like a wave which appears
only to lose itself
in dispersal, rising whole again
yet incomplete in all but
form, it returns.
Music. The true magic.
Each day the sun passes over the river,
bringing warmth to it. Such
devotion inspires movement: a cello in the
darkness, the passage of sparrows. Sighs.
The currents are of our own
making. If we listen do we also
hear? These bodies. These silent voices.
* * *
“Requiem” was written in the 80s, in response to a piece of music. It made its most recent appearance here in November 2016.
Ripple Poetry 