National Poetry Month Card #2

April 2nd, 2009

National Poetry Month greeting card #2

I’m doing one of these a day until the end of April. To send it, copy the permalink or the image file link into an email, tweet, Facebook DM, etc. — or just download and make free with the image.

This entry was posted Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 at 1:59 pm and is filed under Humor, NaPoMo cards and tagged greatest hits.

10 Responses to “National Poetry Month Card #2”

JMartin says:

April 2, 2009 at 3:07 pm

WAR OF THE ORANGES WON’T RHYME

Note the odd nexus
of scurvy war and citrus:
Proto-Indo-European nek-es

Internecine’s root of death
appears in nectarine -
a bloodless, fuzzfree
ascorbic saviour

Dave says:

April 2, 2009 at 3:28 pm

Wonderful, Julia! I had to look up the etymology to get everything you were saying here — the American Heritage Dictionary has a brief essay.

Reply

JMartin says:

April 2, 2009 at 8:41 pm

Even as a child, I knew that nectarines were the most sinister of the ever-suspect stone fruits.

Dave says:

April 2, 2009 at 10:21 pm

I’ll grant you that the smooth skin is suspicious, like men who shave their heads to hide their baldness.

Reply

dale says:

April 3, 2009 at 1:40 am

:-) I enjoyed this very much.

Dave says:

April 3, 2009 at 8:42 pm

Thanks, Dale.

Reply

Ivy says:

April 3, 2009 at 7:12 am

Ha! I think ‘bloody internecine conflict’ is about right.

Dave says:

April 3, 2009 at 8:46 pm

Oh yeah? The competition among academic poets reaches its apogee here in the U.S., I gather, but poets everywhere are a contentious lot. Countries with lots of poets, such as Yemen and Somalia, are not famed for pacifism.

Reply

Joan says:

April 3, 2009 at 2:52 pm

Hmmm. This might finally explain why April is the cruelest month. (grin)

Dave says:

April 3, 2009 at 8:41 pm

Hey, maybe so!

Reply

My other projects on the web

Qarrtsiluni, a literary magazine I co-edit
Festival of the Trees, a blog carnival I co-founded
Open Micro, a group blog I belong to dedicated to poetry in 140 or fewer characters
Moving Poems, my daily compendium of video poems from YouTube, Vimeo, and beyond
The Morning Porch, Twitter-length prose-poems based on the view from my porch first thing in the morning
Woodrat Photoblog, "a midden of photos from a Pennsylvania mountaintop"
Shadow Cabinet, an online collection of my more recent poems
Spoil, an online collection of my older poems

(For a complete listing, see my Google profile)

Smorgasblog

not native fruit
i find them inspiring because they represent ordinary working-class people expressing their spiritual creativity in a free and exuberant manner. these folks allow their spirit and zest for living to spill out creatively filling space and air with color and sound. against the backdrop of an often grim and always gritty-gray environment they project an alternative.
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Somewhere in NJ
Owls are the stuff of imagination. Seeing these keepers of shadow requires exploring the edges of light... if one fails at it, the fault lies not in the seeing, but instead with one's way of looking.
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Clive Hicks-Jenkins' Artlog
Sometimes the cold was such that I sat with my feet in newspaper-stuffed cardboard boxes to stop my toes from freezing. So there was rigour and hardship of a kind, which is what I wanted. I think perhaps over-idealising solitude might be a failing of creative people.
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Velveteen Rabbi
The sadness arises
again
and cuts my legs
out from under me

the monotony
of trying to soothe
screams as frequent
as the waves...
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Small Change
Camille Claudel hugs the marble child
she made, while Rodin lectures her

on the tyranny of feelings.
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slow reads
I wave at black windows as the orange bus sets. My son, where do you sit? Do you see? look?
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Crackskull Bob
One good thing about drawing snow scenes is you can leave a lot of space blank. Artists are basically lazy, or else you'd find us working down to the Ford plant or whatnot. Instead of losing appendages in machinery or listening to assholes say "How's that report coming, Taylor?" we get to sit around playing with paints, a skill we pretty much mastered in kindergarten.
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Journey to the Center
Some names were as familiar as my own — Argiope aurantia, Anatis mali, Erythemis simplicicollis…. well, there were dozens and dozens of them. In the weeks after we began our fight with cancer, those names would gradually be replaced by the names of chemo agents, bones requiring radiation treatments, drugs available under clinical trials, and so on. Gradually, over time, it was as though some strange cloud of selective amnesia descended upon me.
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Creature of the Shade
One of the most basic pleasures of the Australian landscape, to me, is the complex sensation of being watched by a kangaroo.
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Coyote Crossing
Longing and terror are both of them valid responses to the immensity of this landscape. It seems a shame to me that there are people who have never seen a thing like this, who have never once been out of sight of civilization’s scars upon the earth. Those are the only places I feel whole. What kind of truncated life it must be, to have all your skies dissected by overhead wires, all your earth parceled out in neat lots.
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Via Negativa

How can we live without the unknown before us? —Rene Char