Hello and Happy Poetry Friday! Be sure to visit Jone Rush MacCulloch for Roundup.
Next week I'll be sharing time with some of you in person at Boyds Mills (formerly Highlights). Hooray!
Today's ArtSpeak: WOMEN is an anti-love poem after a piece by Gabriele Münter. Sometimes I get tired of writing and reading poems all about how wonderful everything is—though I am most definitely in the "everything is a miracle" camp. Sometimes I get to missing loved ones who are far away—by way of death, geography, or life—and I like to put on my curmudgeon hat and write from that place.
I've done this before: Today I'm Feeling Autumn
Make no mistake: I love autumn! It's my most favorite season! Which makes it a perfect subject for an anti-love poem. Thanks so much for reading.
so what it's autumn
all those leaves crunch-crunching
squirrels squirreling
crisp air turning crisper so what
I am here and you are there
the fire we started just
embers embering now
All your disclaimers made me laugh, Irene. I often hesitate to share poems that are maybe how I feel in fleeting moments but not how I feel most of the time. Everybody's so quick to take a single poem and use it to label the poet as...whatever. As if all poems are confessional and about ourselves. Anyway, thanks for sharing, and I love how there's beauty even in your curmudgeonly poem. Because who could read it without hearing the crunch of leaves and the skittering of squirrel and feeling the heat of that fire we were lucky to have. <3
ReplyDeleteLove the painting and poem. Your sentiment is apt -- ironically, the beauty of autumn is the beauty of nature dying.
ReplyDeleteThis poem reminds me so much of lyricist Fran Landesman's very popular Ella Fitzgerald standard, "Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring_Can_Really_Hang_You_Up_the_Most) - It's a new season! Everyone is into it! Except me! Because WHERE ARE YOU, great love I was promised??? - And I love that energy because sometimes none of us are into what everyone else seems to be, but MOST OF US fake it.
ReplyDeleteI love the "so what" at the end here, and the rueful look back at what should have been flames roaring, but is mere embers. This lands so perfectly, brava.
And I am smiling because this is the gentlest possible ANTI-LOVE poem ever, just embers embering, no swearing no slashing at cruel geography: just "love was there and now it's gone." I think it's really a pro-love poem, finely structured. I'm a big fan of the goat in that painting!
ReplyDeleteMy fleeting love for autumn’s leaf crunching falls in the NO….Not Yet category. I love your placement of so what.
ReplyDeleteOh gosh...I love how your title sets the tone (even without your intro)! You're so good at challenging yourself, Irene. Wish I were going to Boyds!
ReplyDeleteThe reality of autumn is that it signals the gradual ending of the warmth. We feel it gradually ebb away across the season. The leaves prepare to go, to 'leave' us. These seasonal truths make your poem most apt, Irene. It provides another prespective to our relationship with this season of mellow fruitfulness.
ReplyDeleteThis makes me smile. Of course there are days that we are just "anti" and why not make poetry out of it? It works...I can see this as part of a larger work of lots more poems.
ReplyDeleteAutumn can definitely be a season of loss. Love that ending line, Irene. See you soon!
ReplyDeleteEmbers embering—I love that and we can’t be fully human without acknowledging our range of feelings. Certainly they are elicited by my extended family.:) I’ll be thinking of everyone at PP! Have a great conference.
ReplyDeleteI am smiling at the idea of an "anti-love" poem. And this: put on my curmudgeon hat and write from that place. Looking forward to next week.
ReplyDeleteYou captured grump grumpiness in all the best ways! The repetition in your noun-verbs, and the repetition of "so what" made me imagine that those leaves were crunching under feet that were stomping. :-)
ReplyDeleteAs others have mentioned, "embers embering" captures autumn so well. Like you, I love autumn until all the leaves are gone, which now, in Connecticut at least, they mostly are. I wish I could be with you at Boyds Mills! I know you all will have a wonderful, inspiring time!
ReplyDeleteOh, I adore this -- especially that last visceral line, of course. Well done!
ReplyDeleteOooh, love the attitude here, Irene! :)
ReplyDelete