Today for Quadrille Monday, the prompt word is “ash.” I wrote this as a cherita, too, since it happened to work that way.
Doesn’t everyone want a chance at a new life? Continue reading
Fire
Burning
A poem in couplets for MVB: Lamp and FOWC: Combination, linked up with DVerse’s open-link night.
Arise, O lamp of dawn,
And let the night be gone!
How quickly the night fell,
That force-fed taste of Hell.
How dark the dead of night;
How dead one leaves that fight.
A combination of
Sleeplessness, dearth of love
Makes one almost give up,
Fumbling salvation’s cup —
Until the sun returns:
Yet how these trials burn!
A Fire-F(l)ight of Ideas
One of my favorite pursuits is writing poems, and I love to try new forms. One such form is the Mirrored Refrain, which is our challenge at DVerse Poets. However, I don’t always make time to write for every prompt that I want to try! It can be overwhelming at times to have several vague ideas at once but no idea how to solidify them. Occasionally, even though creative writing is fun and tends to be stress-relieving and make me come alive, moments like that can also make me anxious. (For example, I forgot to respond to this prompt about fire last week, so now I’m responding quickly to his prompt about anxiety. 🙂 )
When a Meteor Comes and Destroys All Your Plans
This was inspired by today’s FOWC: Laconic and the Sunday Writing Prompt from MLMM, “great balls of fire.” I decided to also combine it with the photo challenge. Might as well link up with the Writers’ Pantry, too. 🙂
Spark
This quadrille, containing the word “swift,” is for DVerse (a day late) and for FOWC: Spark (on time).
One spark alights, on grass and kindling dry
One spark ignites, swiftly all its surroundings
One spark lights, a fallen Lucifer
In the inky night, flinging open a portal
To hell, as flames leap up where
One spark fell.
Be careful, playing with matches.
In Awe, Appalled
This was inspired by the Sunday writing prompt at MLMM, which is the word “Aghast.” I am combining it with “Same, Same, but Different” using synonyms for these words:
- change
- effect
- skip
- betray
- wonder
Ash Wednesday
For Frank’s current haikai challenge, I wrote a haibun about Ash Wednesday.
The ashes that are used to mark the foreheads of the faithful, as a sign of repentance, grief yet hope, are the ashes from the burnt palm branches from the previous year’s Palm Sunday. Since Palm Sunday was cancelled for the public last Lent, I wonder which branches were burned. They were burned along with the hope of certain earthly pleasures — a reminder that this was never meant to be anyone’s true home.
Symbol-filled ashes:
Journey to destination
Because life is Lent
Snow and Mud and Ashes
This is for Linda Kruschke’s paint-chip poetry prompt, the first of this year. I’m not sure how well my “abstract poetry” turned out, but here it is, and I am sharing with DVerse OLN also.
A safety-orange traffic cone is brighter than day.
Snow blankets the ground, stifling any seedling
Which might emerge from what was once just mud.
Ashes from a campfire dapple snow with gray —
Seedlings push through the greatest of difficulties.
Angels can be made in snow, days made brighter,
Even those ashes speak of happier days gifted —
Some people have a raven’s shadow above their door, never lifted.
Sorry, when I am given “raven” as a prompt word, my mind always goes, “Poe.”
Thinking About Silence
This is for Linda Kruscke’s paint-chip poetry week 52 — wow, we have been at this for a year! I wrote three poems inspired by the theme of silence and the paint-chip words (though no rhyming tercets or triolets). It was hard to pick only one word, so sometimes, I ignored that stipulation. 🙂 Poetic license!
I just realized: license is an anagram of silence! Wow!
Also, this is ironic, but the theme of silence truly has a lot to say, at least to me.
Cozy Words
This quadrille is for DVerse, and when I saw the post title, “In the Inglenook,” I thought it must be gibberish because I had never heard that word before! Maybe it’s because I live in California, where we have no need of fireplaces (or, therefore, of inglenooks 🙂 ). Anyway, I am happy to have learned a new word today; here is my attempt at a quadrille!
But first, the definition quoted in the original DVerse post:
For those of you not familiar with the word, here is a definition:
INGLENOOK (noun,English)- A close intimate corner by a fireplace where people gather for warmth; from ingle, a hearth (Scots)
