NaPoWriMo & Nell (A Poem & A Picture)

/ Janna Hill / Leave a comment

Do you all remember the 1994 movie about a strange girl named Nell who seems to speak her own language? Liam Neeson finds her (Jodi Foster) living alone in a cabin somewhere in the beautiful backwoods of North Carolina. He is amused by her, befriends her and through his study we learn the reason for Nell’s unique dialect.

(Get/watch the movie here if you’re interested.) NELL

Nell was a good movie and NaPoWriMo is a good way of assuring us that poetry [the good, bad and the ugly] will live on – at least for a few more years.

So what does one topic have to do with the other? A couple of things. One, poetry (or NaPoWriMo) is like the movie Nell – most people love it or hate it and two, when I say NaPoWriMo I think of Nell. Sometimes I start waving like a tree in the wind with my arms extended as if they were branches; dancing uninhibited and speaking in Nellish, Tay ina win… inna t’ee inna way… T’ee an me an t’ee an me, Reesa, reesa, reesa me. Chicka, chicka, chickabee.

And then some killjoy disrupts me with a reality check:

This is Janna card

Janna is not Nell, she is not a tree... and she has no rhythm.

 Oh well: doana kee chickabee, NaPoWriMo mos owe stee tie. Two we main.

Translation: don’t cry chickadee baby, National Poetry Writing Month is almost over  – or you still have time. Two weeks remain.

* Getting Me Back (The Voices Within) released this month and is available in digital or paperback. AND as a small token of my appreciation I have arranged for Clan Destiny Book I and Book II to be available without charge via Kindle April 14th and 15th.  An honest review would not hurt my feelings. 😉

Tune in next week for more #NPM.

For Jessica (A Poem & A Picture)

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This is my daughter (Jessica’s) favorite poem by Shel Silverstein. I cannot count the number of times we read Where the Sidewalk Ends as she was growing up.

As I was readying to take a shot of the book nestled among jasmine a caterpillar dropped from the sky and pooped! Can you believe it? Hmph! What does he know about poetry?! Gee-sh… and I had just scraped twenty years of boogers off!

Shel Silverstein Where the Sidewalk Ends

SARAH CYNTHIA SYLVIA STOUT WOULD NOT TAKE THE GARBAGE OUT

By Shel Silverstein

Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout

Would not take the garbage out.

She’d wash the dishes and scrub the pans

Cook the yams and spice the hams,

And though her parents would scream and shout,

She simply would not take the garbage out.

And so it piled up to the ceiling:

Coffee grounds, potato peelings,

Brown bananas and rotten peas,

Chunks of sour cottage cheese,

It filled the can, it covered the floor,

It cracked the windows and blocked the door,

With bacon rinds and chicken bones,

Drippy ends of ice cream cones,

Prune pits, peach pits, orange peels,

Gloppy glumps of cold oatmeal,

Pizza crusts and withered greens,

Soggy beans, and tangerines,

Crusts of black burned buttered toast,

Grisly bits of beefy roast…

The garbage rolled on down the hall,

It raised the roof, it broke the wall…

Greasy napkins, cookie crumbs,

Globs of gooey bubble gum,

Cellophane from green baloney,

Rubbery, blubbery macaroni,

Peanut butter, caked and dry,

Curdled milk, and crusts of pie,

Rotting melons, dried-up mustard,

Eggshells mixed with lemon custard,

Cold French fries and rancid meat,

Yellow lumps of Cream of Wheat.

At last the garbage reached so high

That finally it touched the sky,

And all the neighbors moved away,

And none of her friends would come to play,

And finally, Sarah Cynthia Stout said,

“OKAY, I’ll take the garbage out!”

But then, of course it was too late…

The garbage reached across the state,

From New York to the Golden Gate,

And there in the garbage she did hate,

Poor Sarah met an awful fate

That I cannot right now relate

Because the hour is much too late

But children, remember Sarah Stout,

And always take the garbage out!

For JESS A Poem & A Picture

It comes as no surprise Jessica grew up to be a goofball. I thank God every day for allowing me to be her mom.

Reminder:  Getting Me Back (The Voices Within) released this month…

Write Your Own II (A Poem & A Picture)

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Write Your Own A Poem & A Picture

This post was intended as part of Wordless Wednesday but I have to say this. I do not/did not expect a public response but in last weeks Write Your Own (A Poem & A Picture) Sarah replied with a beautiful piece blending the poem and the picture. I must say it was a very pleasant surprise. I understand many of us are timid about publicizing our words/thoughts; potentially exposing ourselves to ridicule but if any of you would like to make your take of the photo in the reply section I would love to read it.

Spring by Edna St. Vincent Millay (A Poem & A Picture)

/ Janna Hill / 2 Comments

 

SPRING FLOWERS A Poem & A Picture Spring

From Second April (Courtesy of everypoet.com Classic Archives)

SPRING

By Edna St. Vincent Millay

To what purpose, April, do you return again?

Beauty is not enough.

You can no longer quiet me with the redness

Of little leaves opening stickily.

I know what I know.

The sun is hot on my neck as I observe

The spikes of the crocus.

The smell of the earth is good.

It is apparent that there is no death.

But what does that signify?

Not only under ground are the brains of men

Eaten by maggots,

Life in itself

Is nothing,

An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.

It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,

April

Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

Don’t you love the last line(s)? They do strike a chord with me — maybe because I am just living out loud and flinging cake against the wall, right?!

Getting Me Back (The Voices Within) released this month and is now available in digital or paperback. AND to show my appreciation for your support there will be a gift of random books by ‘moi’ each weekend in April. Check in, check them out and follow my Author Page at Amazon for future updates.

P.S. A little history on Edna St. Vincent Millay: After her husband’s death from a stroke in 1949 following the removal of a lung, Millay suffered a great deal; she drank recklessly, and had to be hospitalized. A month later she was back at her farm (Steepletop) where she  passed a lonely year working on a new book of poems. She died in 1950 of a heart attack. For more about her works and life visit Poetry Foundation.

 

As rust falls from the anchor (A Poem & A Picture)

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And on we roll..

Week two of NPM (A Poem & I Picture) where I share a photo taken by me and a poem by some awesome poet. I hope you all had a lovely weekend.

Anchor for A Poem & A Picture

 

 

By Chris Green (Poetry Soup)

Where do sandcastles go

when the tide engulfs the view and

lonely shorelines crest in tear drops

beneath white capped dream chasers,

foam laced erasers combing sanded wishes,

taking towers in the water’s rage

as moats become minor indentations

on a beach bathed in the moon light,

moving gleams in metronome tickling

as our hearts wash out to sea

drowning in the depths of forbidden love

and with my final breath,

salt water drenched I profess

that forbidden or not, I love you

and the lighthouse shines its orbiting light

as I go under for the last time

happy in my declaration

as rust falls from the anchor

and I wait until we meet again,

on the island of meant to be

 

Psst, if you want to read some of my poetry Getting Me Back (The Voices Within) released this month and is now available in digital or paperback.

A Small Token of My Appreciation

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#1Unconsecrated Visions Savannah Dawn 2017 cover

Savannah Dawn (Unconsecrated Visions)

As a small token of my appreciation for you all the e-book is free this weekend at Amazon AND it looks like the audiobook is marked down to $1.99 right now. I have no say in the audiobook price but I will tell you Kelley Mack does a great job narrating this weird little short story.

P.S. If  you want to leave an honest review it won’t hurt my feelings.

P.S.S. Feel free to share the love.

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