National Poetry Month

Be Drunk by Charles Baudelaire (A Poem & A Picture)

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Be Drunk A Poem & A Picture

Just FYI: If you pass out around me I will take your picture and show it to the world.

Charles Baudelaire was born in Paris on April 9, 1821 and died August 31, 1867 at the age of forty-six, reportedly of syphilis. Another tidbit;  When Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil) was published in June of 1857, thirteen of its 100 poems were arraigned for inappropriate content. On August 20, 1857, French lawyer Ernest Pinard, who had also famously prosecuted French author Gustave Flaubert, prosecuted Baudelaire for the collection…. Baudelaire was charged with a fine of 300 francs (later reduced to 50), and Les Fleurs du mal suffered from the controversy, becoming known only as a depraved, pornographic work. Now onto the main attraction.

Be Drunk

You have to be always drunk. That’s all there is to it—it’s the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.

But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: “It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish.”

 ♥ ♠ ♣ ♦

Well we made it through week one of NPM. Yay! Let’s all get drunk and get skip the syphilis.

Here comes ‘tha plug’ : I’ve been drunk a time or two, I’ve also published a few hundred poems but I must confess I have never had a STD. And guess what? My dysfunctional disease-free [possibly controversial] book Getting Me Back (The Voices Within) released this month and is now available in digital or paperback. Yeah, I will be saying it again, and again… and again.

Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray (A Poem & A Picture)

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A Poem & A Picture Graveyard Poets

Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard is pretty lengthy so I am posting only the last of it titled The Epitaph. Check out The Poetry Foundation if you would like to read the poem in its’ entirety and read more about the Graveyard poet known as Thomas Gray. What is a Graveyard poet? Well it is not that red rooster in the photo, as far as I could tell he can’t even speak. It’s possible he was just ignoring me; roosters are like that. Anyway… a Graveyard poet is one who writes about such morbid things relating to – oh, you already guessed it, graveyards.

THE EPITAPH

Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth

A youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown.

Fair Science frown’d not on his humble birth,

And Melancholy mark’d him for her own.

 

Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere,

Heav’n did a recompense as largely send:

He gave to Mis’ry all he had, a tear,

He gain’d from Heav’n (’twas all he wish’d) a friend.

 

No farther seek his merits to disclose,

Or draw his frailties from their dread abode,

(There they alike in trembling hope repose)

The bosom of his Father and his God.

 

 I (by the way) have a poem titled My Epitaph. Yes, really!  Getting Me Back (The Voices Within) released this month and is now available in digital or paperback.

 

Cloud- by Sandra Cisneros (A Poem & A Picture)

/ Janna Hill / 9 Comments

 “If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper.”—Thich Nhat Hanh

 Cloud

Before you became a cloud, you were an ocean, roiled and murmuring like a mouth.

You were the shadow of a cloud crossing over a field of tulips.

You were the tears of a man who cried into a plaid handkerchief.

You were a sky without a hat.

Your heart puffed and flowered like sheets drying on a line.

And when you were a tree, you listened to trees and the tree things trees told you.

You were the wind in the wheels of a red bicycle.

You were the spidery Maria tattooed on the hairless arm of a boy in downtown Houston.

You were the rain rolling off the waxy leaves of a magnolia tree.

A lock of straw-colored hair wedged between the mottled pages of a Victor Hugo novel.

A crescent of soap.

A spider the color of a finger nail.

The black nets beneath the sea of olive trees.

A skein of blue wool.

A tea saucer wrapped in newspaper.

An empty cracker tin.

A bowl of blueberries in heavy cream.

White wine in a green-stemmed glass.

 And when you opened your wings to wind, across the punched-tin sky above a prison courtyard, those condemned to death and those condemned to life watched how smooth and sweet a white cloud glides.

*Sandra Cisneros (born December 20, 1954) is an American writer best known for her acclaimed first novel The House on Mango Street (1984) and her subsequent short story collection Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991). She is the recipient of numerous awards including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and is regarded as a key figure in Chicana literature.

Oh my goodness, those final lines left me a little misty eyed. I do not recall reading Sandra Cisneros before but I certainly enjoyed Cloud and in case I haven’t told you 1000 times  Getting Me Back (The Voices Within) released this month and is now available in digital or paperback. I will be saying it again, and again… and again in case you missed it. As a matter of fact I am going to paste it on every NPM post.

P.S. If you have a recommendation for a poem (even your own) Get in Touch

We Got Goals – It’s National Poetry Month Baby!

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Is that a lame title? I can’t help help it, it made me laugh. If you could hear the fella in my head you’d laugh too — or not.

Anywho…

It was a lovely long weekend but now I am back. You wanna see some pictures? Okay.

Pardon my wipers…
Raindrops aren’t falling on my head…
She’ll be comin’ ’round the mountain…

Starting tomorrow I will be posting A Poem & Picture. I can’t guarantee you that I will post daily throughout April but I will earnestly try for two or three a week. There, I’ve set a goal.

The goals of National Poetry Month are to:

  • highlight the extraordinary legacy and ongoing achievement of American poets
  • encourage the reading of poems
  • assist teachers in bringing poetry into their classrooms
  • increase the attention paid to poetry by national and local media
  • encourage increased publication and distribution of poetry books, and
  • encourage support for poets and poetry.

It is NPM, that stands for National Poetry Month baby! Ahhh, I crack me up.

And in case I haven’t told you 1000 times  Getting Me Back (The Voices Within) released this month and is now available in digital or paperback. I will be saying it again, and again… and again in case you missed it. 😉

Before I Go…

/ Janna Hill / 1 Comment

A couple of things before I go…

Perpetual Series has a new cover. The cover was created from a photo I took several years ago. Sadly that flower no longer grows in my garden.

PERPETUAL THE SERIES 2017

 

 

 

 

 

 

Getting Me Back releases tomorrow [Friday March 31st] just in time for NPM and yes, that is my hand on the cover.

Getting Me Back- The Voices Within 2 (897x1280)

 

 

 

 

 

Now I have to run and pack but remember April is only a couple of days away. You all know that April is NPM/National Poetry Month so get ready for it [boys and girls] because I will be back next week and there will be poetry. 😀

 

A Poem & A Picture (On Meeting Robert Hayden in a Dream)

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On Meeting Robert Hayden in a Dream

by Abdul Ali

Winter Daybreak

here among them   the dead   the others   the aliens

I see you without    coke bottle glasses   a wavy comb over

your nose buried inside a notebook  over-

 

flowing with strange sightings   men and women

without a homeland   a library to shelve histories

dreams   the names of rare flowers  fruits  baby names

 

exiled from their villages   learning to say hello

with accents thick   with nostalgia   for their purple planets

here UFO sightings aren’t so spectacular

 

border crossing is quintessentially american  universal

crowds gather in squalid ghettoes where every country is a city

every city is a verse  & every verse echoes “Those Winter Sundays”

 

where a New World opens up where all the martians are welcome

at the writing table with their fountain pens & swollen digits & you

 

whispering

 

what took so long?

A Poem & A Picture (Colorado)

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Poem by Carl Adamshick

My dream lives close to my lungs.
Sometimes I feel it as a pen
spilling ink in the dark purse
of my breathing. My body
lives here in Colorado,
in an apartment with a few plants.
I am what the experts refer to
as history, a small totality
making its way to the future.
In the evening, I inherit death
as an idea, as a subject I’ll be tested on.
Mid-afternoons, I take long walks.
I live by myself as the state lives
by itself in borders it had nothing
to do with. I, too, have a river.
If you ask, I’ll tell you all about the light.

A Poem & A Picture (Meditation for the Silence of Morning)

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Riverbank

Poem by Adam Clay

I wake myself imagining the shape

of the day and where I will find

myself within it. Language is not often

in that shape,

but sentences survive somehow

through the islands of dark matter,

the negative space often more important

than the positive.

Imagine finding you look at the world

completely different upon waking one day.

You do not know if this is permanent.

Anything can change, after all,

for how else would you find yourself

in this predicament or this opportunity

depending on the frame? A single thought

can make loneliness seem frighteningly new

We destroy the paths of rivers to make room for the sea.

A Poem & A Picture (Your Birdhouse)

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And we’re off…

Did you hear the gun? It is officially National Poetry Month.

This pretty ditty is by a woman known only as Ariella, I suppose. No last name or links were provided. 😦

Enjoy your weekend off and keep the suggestions coming.

 

Sparrows Invade (1024x641)

I Used to Be Your Birdhouse

Poem by Ariella

I  used to be your birdhouse.
I could coax you out from your seat in the treetops
from behind the camouflaging greens
and watch you edge out shyly with the wind ruffling your blush feathers.
You’d cling to me when the spring showers started falling
and I could keep you safe and dry, I could always do that.
I’d be there to hear your youthful songs, and I’d whisper back in a language just we knew
and then I’d hug you goodbye and watch you step precariously from my perch,
flapping in the wind, unsure, unaccustomed.
and  I’d be there for you the next day and the next
because I thought you’d still need me.
I never thought I’d see you, the point of a flying V
soaring with your head held high,
not even glancing down at
my tired wooden walls
and faded empty perch.