Greetings once more, friends! My poem today is #98 in this year's Stafford Challenge (and #463, including last year's Stafford Challenge poem count).
Maureen Thorson’s NaPoWriMo prompt: “Today, we challenge you to write your own poem that takes place at night, and describes something magical or strange that happens but that no one is awake (or around) to notice.”
Robert Lee Brewer’s Poem-a-Day suggestion: “For today's prompt, write an unidentified poem.”
Let me do something different today and give you a photo first. To whet your appetite for later.
Okay, now on to the poems. I'm happy today to combine the two prompts in two poems — both prompts in both poems — which I'm grouping together as a single poem with two titled sections.
Strange Night Tankas
“Spring Riddle”
Dark flying creature
swooping under stars, her long
winter sleep done, makes
a baby with sperm she saved
since fall . . . skin wings swoosh unseen.
“Moon Gardens”
Moonflower vines bloom
white at night, beckoning bats,
Luna Moths, Sphinx Moths,
and other mysterious
creatures to scatter pollen.
—Draft by Vince Gotera [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.]
If not for the "unidentified" prompt, however, I probably would have given the first tanka a straightforward title like "Little Brown Bat in Iowa Spring" and have it be a poem on its own. (A single tanka is usually not titled, though, so that's something to [re]consider.) The second tanka, separated out, would probably still be "Moon Gardens," but it could be expanded later into a multiple-tanka sequence. Actually, maybe both sections could become separate tanka sequences, in which case the presence of the title(s) would be defensible. We'll see. Oh! The info in the first tanka is all true with the Little Brown Bat . . . the delayed fertilization is pretty trippy.
Today, Alan has an interesting approach to the prompts with a poem in six-line stanzas (sestets) in tail rhyme or maybe rime couee, both rhymed aabccb — however all in pentameter, rather than the varied line lengths usually associated with those forms.
Mothman (Not an Elizabeth Bishop Allusion)
I was driving a van back from Athens, OH,
because that was the place that we had to go
for an Appalachian Studies conference at the school,
when a colleague and a good friend of mine
asked the students in the van if they would be fine
if we took a little side trip to see something cool.
I figured I knew what she had in mind,
because, I tell you, for the longest time,
she’d been just crazy about cryptids that bump in the night,
and she smiled just as sweet as a honey-drowned pissant
when she told us we’re going down to Point Pleasant
to the Mothman Statue, the area’s most pleasant sight.
The Mothman’s West Virginia’s best feature,
inspired by a ’60s account of a creature
that disrupted two couples parked outside the city line.
It was bigger than a man, superlinebacker size,
with great giant wings and red glowing eyes
like the flames from a mystical, radiant, sacred sign.
There’s a Mothman Museum and a statue, as well,
but the clouds had gone gray. It was colder’n hell,
and the two-lane beside the Ohio was narrow and long.
I was getting about as antsy as a pre-school teacher
when one of the students, a jackleg preacher
from a rescue mission decided to sing an old song.
It was a Charlie Daniels tune about being a hippie
in some backwoods town, maybe in Mississippi,
and I was relieved it wasn’t about the Georgia fiddler.
He was sharing the back bench seat with a woman
who kind of admired his air guitar strummin’
and his puppy dog look that meant he’d like to diddle her.
The action in the back was getting bolder and bolder,
and I began to feel a kind of burn on each shoulder
that jolted me so hard I clenched the steering wheel.
They were laughing and cooing and tickling and slapping,
and as I glimpsed in the rearview to see what was happening,
what I saw instead I could not believe to be real.
Now the other students were lost in their phones
and without a clue. It felt like my bones
would pull out of their joints as I grew to twice my size.
I was not feeling good, and I got in a hurry,
then saw how my hands had gone lengthy and furry,
and there in the mirror were red-glowing, saucer-sized eyes.
My colleague behind me caught us in the curve
and pulled up beside us as I made a swerve
to a paved parking lot of the First Baptist Fellowship Hall.
I put it in park and switched off the ignition
marveling I had retained my cognition,
wrenched open my door and stood outside, naked and tall
except for some shorts with near-popping elastic
(because all my proportions were downright fantastic),
and I felt a compulsion to fly, but I couldn’t say where,
and my colleague was weeping with joy as her camera
captured what otherwise would be ephemera
but became a staple of memes popping up everywhere.
There’s not much to tell about what happened next.
The mayor responded to somebody’s text
and had us escorted downtown, put us up for the night—
except me, under watch, when the first early ray
of the sun put me back to myself. To this day,
I’ve not been the Mothman again, and I feel all right.
No, that part’s a lie. There are times, early mornings,
when newscasts describe what smart folks see as warnings,
my shoulders start burning, and I take a flight near my home,
wake some dogs, roust some deer, hear the earliest cooing
of doves, feel the mist, realize what I’m doing
is clearing my mind for the challenging day yet to come.
—Draft by Thomas Alan Holmes [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.]
About this poem, Alan told me, "There is really a Mothman Statue in Point Pleasant." And there it is up above, red eyes and all. Go up and look at it again. Be sure to click on it to see it larger. And pinch it wider to see it even better. That's a great yarn, Alan! It is a yarn, right?
Incidentally, the Elizabeth Bishop allusion that this poem is not, is to her poem "The Man-Moth" (though that's worth looking at for another magical creature — or man?).
Thanks for visiting the blog, dear readers. See you again tomorrow?
Friends, won’t you comment, please? Love to know what you’re thinking. Thanks!
Ingat, everyone. ヅ |
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