Day 17 ... NaPoWriMo / Poem-a-Day 2021

Robert Lee Brewer’s Poem-a-Day prompt: “[W]rite a waiting poem. It could be about waiting tables, but it can also involve any interpretation of waiting. Waiting in line at the store or for a package in the mail or whatever else someone (or something) might wait for.” Maureen Thorson’s NaPoWriMo prompt: “I’ve seen some fairly funny twitter conversations lately among poets who are coming to terms with the fact that they keep writing poems about the moon. For better or worse, the moon seems to exert a powerful hold on poets, as this large collection of moon-themed poems suggests. Today, I’d like to challenge you to stop fighting the moon. Lean in. Accept the moon. The moon just wants what’s best for you and your poems. So yes – write a poem that is about, or that involves, the moon.” Today, I offer for your perusal an ekphrastic persona poem in blank verse, combining both prompts. The Moon, Always Waiting, Speaks —after The Midnight Ride of     Paul Revere by Grant Wood As I look down on Earth, my orbiting partner in space, I am puzzled by many things, and I just watch and wait and watch. Tonight, I see a forest of green moons, dark baby moons sleeping all together. I know when they grow into teenage moons and begin to shine, they’ll move into the buildings, with the square windowpanes, their adolescent lunar light radiating out onto the meandering road. As adults, during the day when their moonglow is hidden in sunlight, they will climb the spire of the church and launch themselves into the sky to begin their journeys outward through the galaxy, each becoming, like me, a goddess for some planet. But for now, the young moons are simply content to watch the goings-on of the silly little humans, like the small man riding by on a black horse, leaving no trace, no track, on the trail lit by me. —Draft by Vince Gotera    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] Grant Wood, The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere (1931) Here is Alan's poem today, in response to both prompts, a Petarchan sonnet. And I, Too, Am a Pocked Body of Dust If You Get Too Close A scientist will say the sun can see no more than its reflector, moon, but why are we so quick to share the symbol, eye for sun, a seeing eye like God’s, and be content the moon, as cold as certainty, see nothing? If you seek concealment, try for shadow, sun- or moonbeam, but apply your common sense: the moon is closer, free of shimmers that distort our mid-day sight, and never turns aside. It keeps its face to us though sometimes veiled in shadow, lapped in orbit, soft influence ev’ry night, and, though its month-long blink’s a shadow’s trace, it cannot help but watch and wait entrapped. —Draft by Thomas Alan Holmes    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] Today is International Haiku Poetry Day — the 17th day of National Poetry Month (traditionally, haiku in English are made up of 17 syllables). In celebration Alan wrote a haiku on the themes of "waiting" and "the moon." Bravo, Alan! I am not waiting on moon cycles to plant seeds; the poles have shifted. —Draft by Thomas Alan Holmes    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] I wrote a haiku also. Today's prompts are quite agile! the sky darkening, we wait while the moon blacks out the sun . . . ring of fire —Draft by Vince Gotera    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] Friends, won’t you comment, please? Love to know what you’re thinking. Thanks! Ingat, everyone.  ヅ

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P.S. This poem was published by the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art on 23 April 2021. Could be fastest turnaround I've had between composition and publication. Thanks, CRMA! Here's a link to the pub.

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