list poem – JUST JOAN 42

YOU DON’T HAVE TO GO HOME BUT YOU CAN’T STAY HERE

April 22, 2020April 19, 2020Just Joan14 Comments

Today’s response to MURI’S 2020 CHALLENGE FOR NATIONAL POETRY MONTH. Like the 2019 challenge, this consists of 13 prompts, one for each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday in April. They can be completed in any order. If you are interested in participating, click on the above link for the prompts and posting guidelines.

Prompt #11 is “Write an acrostic poem using a word to describe your worst enemy.”

Menopause hit me like a ton of bricks. Fat cells gathered for a family reunion in the space between my armpits and knees. When the party was over, I couldn’t get them to leave so I let them hang around. I fed them cheese manicotti and Pringles. I encouraged them to be fruitful and multiply. “Size doesn’t matter” became my mantra, along with its pants tag cousin “16 is the new 14.” But those extra pounds caused a lot of old friends to turn on me. Suddenly, everything felt tighter—elastic waistbands, t-shirts, armchairs, the space between my car and the garage wall, my chest when I walked a couple blocks with the dog. There were more and more things to avoid—fitting rooms, swimsuits, photos that showed my chins, high school reunions, rickety lawn chairs, Spanx garments capable of suffocation or entrapment.

When I resolved to lose weight, the cosmos used every trick in the book to try and stop me. NOOM proved too technologically challenging. The local gym was pricey and required an extra pair of shoes, ones that had never set foot in the outside world. Nine days after I joined, they shut down due to Coronavirus. The same week, the nurse called with my lab results; I was to decrease my thyroid medication, which would make my mission even more difficult. The grocery store ran out of low-fat mayo and multi-grain flatbread. But the more the universe thwarted me, the more determined I became. I counted calories, swore off snacking, and upped the daily dog walk to a mile. I crocheted to keep my hands busy. Over a period of six weeks, my afghan grew and I shrank. Not so much that I’d blow away in a strong wind, but my enemy is not as formidable as he once was. I’m on the road to victory!

IN THE REARVIEW

Worrying about BP, diabetes, heart attacks
Every year, buying new jeans in a larger size
Insecurity, avoiding mirrors, dodging selfies
Going toe-to-toe with the fridge and losing
Hating the scale with its big black numbers
Trying to squeeeeze into a shrinking world

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ONE LOVE POEM, MANY FORMS

March 24, 2019March 22, 2019Just Joan23 Comments

In honor of Valentine’s Day, my poetry group did a writing exercise wherein each person contributed a phrase about the source of love.
A few days after the meeting, our fearless leader Steve arranged
the phrases (verbatim) into a poem which he sent to us via email:

They say that love is never lost, so why can’t I find it?
Love comes from love
Innate, hard-wired unless over-written by Fortune or Fate
a cookie pan
Love–divine–like birds, always there, even in winter
When in the midst of pouring rain, a smile warms the day

He challenged us to re-work it if we wished. Woo-hoo! A batch of free verse phrases crying out for structure, a form… This sounds like a job for JustJoan! But what form would I use? Which one would do justice to this wide variety of ideas and images? Naturally occurring rhymes were scarce, so I began with syllabic forms: eintou, cinquain, haiku, and diminished hexaverse. I figured I’d hit on the right one sooner or later.
I got lucky on my first try, but kept on going. Perhaps one of the other forms would work better. What I found, to my surprise, is that they all worked. Emboldened, I decided to try a couple forms with rhyme and refrain: lai and rondelet. With a few synonyms and a touch of creative license, these also worked. I added an acrostic for good measure. You guessed it, it worked. I’d always believed that words suggested their own poetic form, but maybe verse in search of an outlet finds one in whatever form it is offered. Without further ado, poems about love:

Eintou Septet
7 lines
Syllables 2 / 4 / 6 / 8 / 6 / 4 / 2

LOVE IS
constant
like winter birds
warm smiles on rainy days
divine, innate, subject to Fate
never lost, hard to find
on cookie pans
from love

Cinquain
5 lines,
Syllables 2 / 4 / 6 / 8 / 2

LOVE
Warm smiles
Birds in winter
Never lost, hard to find
Divine, Innate, on cookie pans
From Love

Haiku
3 lines
Syllables 5 / 7 / 5

HAIKU
Love is never lost
Found in smiles, birds, gods, the self
and on cookie pans

Diminished Hexaverse
5 stanzas, first stanza has 5 lines, each 5 syllables, second has 4 lines, each 4 syllables, third has 3 lines, each 3 syllables, fourth has 2 lines, each 2 syllables, fifth has 1 line, 1 syllable

LOVE

Around and within
Like birds, always there
even in winter
A smile that warms us
on a rainy day

Innate, and yet
subject to Fate
The divine yield
of cookie pans

Never lost
but sometimes
hard to find

Love is
born of

Love

Lai
9 lines with rhyme scheme a / a / b / a / a / b / a / a / b.
a lines have 5 syllables, b lines have 2 syllables

LOVE IS
The Divine revealed
Within us concealed
Innate
A cookie pan’s yield
A pouring-rain-shield
Smile-shaped
A Lost-Found ordeal
A spin of the wheel
of Fate

Rondelet
7 lines with rhyme/refrain scheme A / b / A / a / b / b / A.
Refrain (A) is 4 syllables, all other lines are 8 syllables, all lines written in dimeter

SOURCE OF LOVE
Love comes from love
and warming smiles on rainy days
Love comes from love
and cookie pans, and God above
Within us all, subject to Fate
It’s never lost but just misplaced
Love comes from love

Acrostic
The first letters of each line spell something related to the poem

LOVE
They say that love is never lost so
How come I can’t find it?
Even in winter it is there, like birds
Smiles that warm us in the midst
Of pouring rain. Divine. Innate.
Unless overwritten by Fortune or Fate
Really, it is borne on cookie pans
Chocolate Chip Love, Oatmeal Love
Ephemeral and yet, everlasting

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