Day Three. Third time’s a charm. One hopes, anyway.
Maureen Thorson’s NaPoWriMo prompt: “I’d like to challenge you to write an elegy — a poem that mourns or honors someone dead or something gone by. And . . . center the elegy on an unusual fact about the person or thing being mourned.”
Robert Lee Brewer’s PAD prompt: “take the phrase ‘(blank) of Love,’ replace the blank with a word or phrase, make the new phrase the title of your poem, and then, write your poem.”
In my poem today, I try to speak plain, perhaps at the expense of poetic beauty. It’s an elegy, as you’ll see, with a nod toward what made us unusual in contrast with other countries. And the title has a long phrase — a couple of phrases — coming before “of Love.”
Love of Country? Or Country of Love?
Right now, I’m afraid it’s neither, my friends,
talking about the country’s overall climate.
Not the weather, not the season, but
how everything is done now for selfish ends.
Love of country is missing in action, and country
of love . . . forget it. Those days of service are gone.
Americans, this is an elegy for our country:
that land where a boy raised in a log cabin
could become President. That’s what made us
unique. Now you’ve got to be born with a gold
golf club in your hand. A hand that grabs
whatever it wants, everything it can hold.
Not love. Not country. Nothing but me, me, me.
Trump towers from sea to shining sea.
—Draft by Vince Gotera [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.]
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Trump
Towers
(Miami)
Doubled
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For what it’s worth, this poem is a hybrid sonnet . . . it starts off as a Petrarchan sonnet with an envelope quatrain (abba) but turns into a Shakespearean sonnet in the rest of the poem's alternating quatrains and couplet (cdcd efef gg). An educational tidbit for you poetry-writing students out there.
Turning to Alan's poem today, for his intro Alan says, “Vince made a comment today that he has no ties to the South, and I have nothing but ties to the South, and that makes any elegy hurt like everything. Here’s the love metaphor, too.”
Wide-Ruled Spiral Notebook of Love
Shoved so far between the seat cushions I’d
‘a’ liked to ‘a’ never pulled it out, I found
another one of those notebooks he always kept
in his truck, the ones where he would figure
how to build aluminum awnings and patios
for his clients, always writing with a retractable
ball-point pen his cribbed print, the lower-case
letters as big as the capitals, and never along the lines.
His math was always good. I was flipping through it,
never intending to read or keep it, when I found her name,
“Ruth Hardy,” the mother of his boyhood friend,
a woman always kind to him all of her life. A few years
ago, I took him to see her around Christmas time,
when his dementia was just beginning to be unhidden
and she was not likely to see another Christmas,
when she hugged his neck and years just fell off him for a moment
in a way I rarely see among people I know any more,
and I got that unsettling feeling that I was seeing them
together for the last time, and, sure enough, within months, she was gone,
and his friend was gone soon after. But I held her name
in his hand in this notebook. He had once written a rhyme
in a notebook like this one, and he had asked me to copy it
by hand when I was still a graduate student in Tuscaloosa.
He called her a rose in a single, four-line verse,
rhyming the second and fourth lines, and he wanted me
to type it up in a nice font and print it out so he could give it to her,
and he tore it from the notebook and sent it with me.
I printed it in a typeface he would consider fancy
and made sure I had the printout with me the next time I came home.
That Christmas, it was on her refrigerator,
fixed by a couple of magnets as if a schoolkid
had brought home a better homework grade
than usual, and it was dented up, as if she had
taken it down and shown it to folks and then put it back
on the refrigerator. I don’t have either copy of that poem,
and I would chew out that smart-aleck know-it-all
graduate student in literature I was if I had the Goddamned opportunity.
—Draft by Thomas Alan Holmes [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.]
Wow, that does “hurt like everything,” even for a guy who has no connection to the South. I see that in my poem today, I allude to the President in the North during the War Between the States. What do I know? Wait, Andrew Jackson was a Southerner and he was born in a log cabin. Hmm. Nonetheless, what a beautiful poem, Alan. Congrats, even if it hurts. Or especially because it hurts.
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Ingat, everyone. ヅ |
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2 comments:
Vince, I have some strong opinions about the Oval Office's occupant and I will post them should the prompts fit. For now, I am not convinced there is North and South. It's just red all over.
Amen, brother, amen.
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