Thursday, March 12, 2009

Poetry Stretch Results - Opposites

The challenge this week was to write a poem in which two words opposite in meaning were used in both the body of the poem and the title. Here are the results.
Jane Yolen left this poem in the comments.
    News/Noise

    The ticker tape parade
    masquerades
    as news, but it is not.
    Instead,what we’ve got,
    is a noisy celebration,
    elaborating
    on polls, bumper stickers,
    twitters, tweets,
    buttons, sound bytes,
    effluvial bits
    that are merely guesses.
    News regresses
    quickly into noise
    when there is no science
    behind it, or math.
    What hath
    God–or at least Hearst
    and the pundits--
    wrought?
    Writing on a dirty wall,
    graffiti
    with graphics,
    the moving hand,
    mene, mene, teckle uparsin,
    and that is all.

    copyright 2009 Jane Yolen
Kim Kasch also left a poem in the comments.
    “Love or Loath”

    Lo . . .

    It’s easy to fall in
    Yet the hardest game to win

    I've loved then lost
    and loathed the cost

    It's such a wicked price to pay
    when love is free to give away
Jacqueline at Neverending story shares a poem entitled Clean vs. Green.

Lisa Chellman at under the covers gives us the poem Blind/Sighted.
I tried hard to write a funny poem, but my poems and I are sailing through the doldrums right now. At any rate, here's my contribution.
The Long and the Short of It

“Here’s the thing”
she says
before launching into a rambling story that
grasps at fading memories and revelries

Interrupted by stops and starts
intrusions of other remembrances

“Now, where was I?”
she continues
describing the childhood kitchen where her mother
cooked meals for a growing brood
I remember only the kitchen table and chairs,
the apron my grandmother wore,
the pantry where chocolate treasures were concealed in a chip can

What does this have to do with Mrs Murphy’s daughter?
I wish I knew

The stories are long
my patience sometimes short

Still I listen for
my mother’s laugh
my grandmother’s whisper
past reverberating into future with
time moving ever forward
wondering how you summarize a life
well spent and long lived
It's not too late if you still want to play. Leave me a note about your poem and I'll add it to the list.

8 comments:

  1. Never mind the humor, Tricia--that's a powerful piece.

    Jane

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  2. I don't have a poem, but I'm sure one of you can make something out of this. The Wednesday morning after the election I came into the building and ran into a colleague. I asked if she'd watched the election results/speeches. I was still talking when she answered and both our sentences ended, at the same time, with the words "wasn't that..." but mine finished with "awesome" while hers finished with "awful."

    Sigh.

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  3. I think these are so good, said very humbly. I'm over at http://theweekthatwas.wordpress.com/ again. Thanks. Jacqueline

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  4. Wow! This reminds me of my grandmother, except we had spritz cookies! The last stanza is beautiful!

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  5. Tricia,

    I love all three "ooposite" stretches.

    As for your not being able to write a funny poem: I have found many times that a poem takes me where IT wants to go.

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  6. Thanks for the stretch, Tricia! I finally got mine together here.

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  7. Trisha I like this one very much. It's beautiful what you've done with the frustration.

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  8. Jane's poem is great, and also made me go look up "mene, mene, tekel uparsin" and now I know more than I did before.

    Alas, I didn't manage to find opposites this week.

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