WEEK 17

Week 16 vanished at the beach.    Did anyone notice that we never had a week twelve?

anyway. Our words for this week come from Pablo Neruda and his poem "A Dog Has Died":

A Dog Has Died

My dog has died.
I buried him in the garden
next to a rusted old machine.

Some day I'll join him right there,
but now he's gone with his shaggy coat,
his bad manners and his cold nose,
and I, the materialist, who never believed
in any promised heaven in the sky
for any human being,
I believe in a heaven I'll never enter.
Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom
where my dog waits for my arrival
waving his fan-like tail in friendship.

Ai, I'll not speak of sadness here on earth,
of having lost a companion
who was never servile.
His friendship for me, like that of a porcupine
withholding its authority,
was the friendship of a star, aloof,
with no more intimacy than was called for,
with no exaggerations:
he never climbed all over my clothes
filling me full of his hair or his mange,
he never rubbed up against my knee
like other dogs obsessed with sex.

No, my dog used to gaze at me,
paying me the attention I need,
the attention required
to make a vain person like me understand
that, being a dog, he was wasting time,
but, with those eyes so much purer than mine,
he'd keep on gazing at me
with a look that reserved for me alone
all his sweet and shaggy life,
always near me, never troubling me,
and asking nothing.

Ai, how many times have I envied his tail
as we walked together on the shores of the sea
in the lonely winter of Isla Negra
where the wintering birds filled the sky
and my hairy dog was jumping about
full of the voltage of the sea's movement:
my wandering dog, sniffing away
with his golden tail held high,
face to face with the ocean's spray.

Joyful, joyful, joyful,
as only dogs know how to be happy
with only the autonomy
of their shameless spirit.

There are no good-byes for my dog who has died,
and we don't now and never did lie to each other.

So now he's gone and I buried him,
and that's all there is to it.


Translated, from the Spanish, by Alfred Yankauer

Our words for this week:

autonomy


buried


gaze


voltage


rusted





     

 

WEEK 15

this week , lets try five words from Richard Buckner's beautiful song
Ariel Ramirez"

 

Words for this week:

tonight

ring

pretend

cured

smoke


have fun writing.

WEEK 14

 

 

 

 

 

A Hymn to Childhood

By Li-Young Lee 

 

Childhood? Which childhood?

The one that didn’t last?

The one in which you learned to be afraid

of the boarded-up well in the backyard

and the ladder in the attic?

The one presided over by armed men

in ill-fitting uniforms

strolling the streets and alleys,

while loudspeakers declared a new era,

and the house around you grew bigger,

the rooms farther apart, with more and more

people missing?

The photographs whispered to each other

from their frames in the hallway.

The cooking pots said your name

each time you walked past the kitchen.

And you pretended to be dead with your sister

in games of rescue and abandonment.

You learned to lie still so long

the world seemed a play you viewed from the muffled

safety of a wing. Look! In

run the servants screaming, the soldiers shouting,

turning over the furniture,

smashing your mother’s china.

Don’t fall asleep.

Each act opens with your mother

reading a letter that makes her weep.

Each act closes with your father fallen

into the hands of Pharaoh.

Which childhood? The one that never ends? O you,

still a child, and slow to grow.

Still talking to God and thinking the snow

falling is the sound of God listening,

and winter is the high-ceilinged house

where God measures with one eye

an ocean wave in octaves and minutes,

and counts on many fingers

all the ways a child learns to say Me.

Which childhood?

The one from which you’ll never escape? You,

so slow to know

what you know and don’t know.

Still thinking you hear low song

in the wind in the eaves,

story in your breathing,

grief in the heard dove at evening,

and plentitude in the unseen bird

tolling at morning. Still slow to tell

memory from imagination, heaven

from here and now,

hell from here and now,

death from childhood, and both of them

from dreaming.

 

 

 

 

OUR WORDS THIS WEEK:

 

attic

 

missing

 

rescue

 

fingers

 

plentitude

 

 

 

WEEK 13

Carrefour
by Amy Lowell
O You, Who came upon me once Stretched under apple-trees just after bathing, Why did you not strangle me before speaking Rather than fill me with the wild white honey of your words And then leave me to the mercy Of the forest bees.

our words this week:

once

bathing

strangle

honey

forest








 

WEEK 11

My Papa’s Waltz

By Theodore Roethke 

The whiskey on your breath

Could make a small boy dizzy;

But I hung on like death:

Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans

Slid from the kitchen shelf;

My mother’s countenance

Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist

Was battered on one knuckle;

At every step you missed

My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head

With a palm caked hard by dirt,

Then waltzed me off to bed

Still clinging to your shirt.

 

 

 

 

 

 

kitchen

 

battered

 

scraped

 

palm

 

shirt

 

 

 

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WEEK 10

This week....five words from the acid-fueled brain of GIBBY HAYNES.



 
descendents

worms

dismay

all-powerful

cathedrals

have fun...let your brain wander.

WEEK 9

THIS WEEK, five words from W.S.Merwin's "thanks":

Thanks
by W. S. Merwin
Listen with the night falling we are saying thank you we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings we are running out of the glass rooms with our mouths full of food to look at the sky and say thank you we are standing by the water thanking it smiling by the windows looking out in our directions back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging after funerals we are saying thank you after the news of the dead whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you over telephones we are saying thank you in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators remembering wars and the police at the door and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you in the banks we are saying thank you in the faces of the officials and the rich and of all who will never change we go on saying thank you thank you with the animals dying around us our lost feelings we are saying thank you with the forests falling faster than the minutes of our lives we are saying thank you with the words going out like cells of a brain with the cities growing over us we are saying thank you faster and faster with nobody listening we are saying thank you we are saying thank you and waving dark though it is. THis Week's Words: BRIDGES GLASS ANIMALS DARK MOUTHS Happy Writing.