April - Poetry Month!

With Shakespeare's birthday in April (round about the 22nd) what better month to celebrate poetry?  As a part of that I am joining the brave (crazy) souls attempting to write a poem a day.  There are two sites in particular that are a great help.  The first is the Imaginary Garden with Real Toads: IGRT and the other is Writer's Digest, Poem a Day: PAD.  Each site will have daily writing prompts and a place to link back to.  IGRT has a great group who are wonderful at reading and giving supportive comments too!  I'll be linking to one or both of these sites every day for the rest of the month.  So, with apologies to the Toads, here is my first poem about frogs and secrets for Mama Zen's request to write a poem in 37 words.


Would you know all my secrets?

Like a frog dissected;

pinned, slit, opened.

You probe

lungs, liver, spleen

leaving nothing unknown

nothing unseen.

And when you finish,

I am ruined

and you are repulsed

at the mess.

    Imge: www.reddit.com

Self-Help

   Image: A boy sits amid the ruins of a London bookshop following an air raid on October 8, 1940, reading a book titled “The History of London.” 

I once thought
I could solve any problem
if only I could find
the right
book.

We Cling to the Familiar

     Image: People in Trees by Mikola Gnisyuk vis Baibakov Art Projects

We cling to the familiar,

to what we know,

long after we know

it no longer serves us,

no longer is true.

We cling to the familiar,

because we have done this

for so long,

to pry our fingers away is painful.

Our hands are adhered,

seared to the surface

of the obsolete.

And in tearing them away

we leave

raw, bloody layers

of ourselves 
behind.

We cling to the familiar,

because we do not know

what else to cling to,

and the thought

of empty hands,

of free falling,

with nothing to hold on to

terrifies us.

We cling to the familiar,

because we know it,

because imagining something else,

something new,

is hard,

and we are lazy.

We resist when we can simply cling

to the familiar.

So we do.

We cling to the familiar

long after

it has become
absurd.

This is for the November PAD (Poem a Day).  The image is a prompt from Robert Brewer at Writers Digest.  Click on the link and check it out.