Napowrimo Day Twenty Three: Children's Poem

Napowrimo 2014 Day twenty two,and we are challenged to write a poem for a child...nursery rhyme or whatever.  Having a one year old granddaughter at the writing, I think of writing one involving an early learning concept: colors, letters, everyday science, and/or self concept.

Counting My family

I fall asleep counting my family:
One is Mommy, two is Daddy,
three and four are
Grampa and Grammy,
five and six are brother and me,
number seven is my kitty,
nearest and dearest of all to me.
Oh, my cousins are eight, nine, ten.
I yawn as I start all over again,
counting my family as I fall aslee....

                   --Shirley Smith Franklin

Farewell--at last, mid-May, THE POEM: "Crazy, About Love"

The last Napowimo 2014 prompt its to write a farewell.  The ideas that spring to mind are ones I want to write about as anecdotes or essays, and I don't want to pre-empt those thoughts before their time.  So my mind wanders over farwell songs I know, and I decide to have some fun, weaving a good night or farewell song with familiar phrasess and lines from well known, popular farewell/good night songs. Let me start with:
Good Night Sweetheart
Irene, Good Night
Abraham, Martin, and John
I'm Leavin', on a Jet Plane
I'll be seeing you
Sleep, my child, and Peace Attend Thee
So long, fare well, auf wiedersehn, good night,
Sentimental Journey
Me and my shadow
                                 -- and see where they get me...
                                 Weeks later: This proves to be the hardest task yet,
                                 but in a way the most satisfying...selecting workable
                                 lines of songs I've loved, and weaving them into something
                                 personal and new.                    
No, that was not the poem.  Now, on May 23, the poem forms, based on words/lines from those songs:

Crazy, About Love

Good night, sweetheart.
I, my midnight watch still keeping,
vigil chasing dreams of sleep,
never felt such sorrows deep.
Good sorrow, sweet sorrow,
sweet good, night sorrow,
beside me/you.  Tomorrow,
sweet sorrow, sweetheart..

I live in dreams--
dreams will enfold you'
enfold me in your dreams
sweet sorrow apart..
Just look around, try to find some good.
Beside me/you
tomorrow, sweet dreams.
Oh, night sorrow burns bright
there by your fireside light.
Every song I sing is just for you.

So kiss me one more time
in all the old familiar places.
Look at everything bright
Tonight I'll be looking at the moon,
Tomorrow will come as soon
as we fly away tonight.
                    --Shirley Smith Franklin

Napowrimo Day 28, Retrospective

Dear Reader,

I appreciate every one of you who has visited my blog this month. I promise to 'catch up' on the last several days, where I've only entered the prompt-for-the-day so far, as we go on into May...so please keep coming back.  After  completing the Napowrimo month challenge, my blog goal will be to share the throes of revising and reorganizing both my study and my writing.

Meanwhile, today's challenge: "And now our (optional) prompt. Today I challenge you to find a news article, and to write a poem using (mostly, if not only) words from the article! You can repeat them, splice them, and rearrange them however you like. Although the vocabulary may be “just the facts,” your poem doesn’t have to be — it doesn’t even have to be about the subject of the news article itself. Happy writing!" 

(Hmmm...Does anyone know how to control the line spacing in the blog? Please comment!)

An author comments on Facebook (re the frequency counter at <www.writewords.org.uk>) that the most frequent words in her latest book were: white, lake, light, hands, small, house, home, blue, red, mother, school, and plastic, which I shall attempt to work into a poem today:


Retrospective

How often in the white light 
of a full moon winter's night
my thoughts return to my 
small Fininish grandmother.
I imagine her 
examining her small hands
from her chair near the window 
overlooking the frozen lake
near the small house
which was her last home.
What now are her thoughts 
as she sits alone, her years
as a wife and mother complete.
Once accustomed to weaving
endless rag rugs shot through 
with strips of red and blue,
while hearty dishes of meat,
potatoes, and bulging roots
put forth a welcoming aroma
to greet their snow frosted 
nine children, his, hers, and ours,
when they returned from school,
does she remember those days 
as, come dinnertime, she rises
to thaw this evening's meal
from its container of plastic?                                      ---Shirley Smith Franklin

April 27 Napowrimo Twenty Seven - Princess

Although it's the twenty seventh, Napowrimo's day twenty six prompt was to write an ekphrastic (i.e. written to accompany a work of art) poem, describing one of four given photographs, none of which inspired me, or a photograph of one's own, which I did.

Princess

You were princess for a day, once.
Your mother had planned out a princess-themed birthday party,
an elaborate treasure hunt which you and your little friends
owned with the lightness and surety of five year olds,
dashing from point to point to find pieces of costumes
only little girls expect to wear as their right,
ballet tutus, improbable gauzy wings, tiaras, at the end,
mardi gras garlands of gaudy beads and a wand
with a star for each princess guest, your majesty
waving yours over all with gladness and joy.
There were giant cupcakes to be conquered,
fitting largesse for reward.
No need for games, for princesses are content
to bask in the company of other princesses.
If only for the day.
                                  -- Shirley Smith Franklin

Napowrimo Day 26, a Curtal Sonnet Exercise, in Pies

From the Napowrimo.net site: " Today’s prompt comes to us from Vince Gotera, who wrote his “family member” poem for Day 20 in the form of a curtal sonnet. As Vince explains, the curtal sonnet is shorter than the normal, fourteen line sonnet. Instead it has a first stanza of six lines, followed by a second stanza of four, and then closes with a half-line. The form was invented in the 1800s by Gerard Manley Hopkins, who used it in his famous poem “Pied Beauty”. So for today, I challenge you to give the curtal sonnet a whirl. It doesn’t need to rhyme — though it can if you like — and feel free to branch out beyond iambic pentameter. Happy writing!"  Well, perhaps I didn't have the muse today...this one evolved more Seussy than meditative or romantic!

     The Pie Beautiful

     Pies are beautiful, there's no doubt
     That, most of us would surely agree.
     Whether apple, blueberry, cherry, 
     (Chocolate,  lemon, pecan, for me!)
     Let me hear it for pies, all pies,
     Hands down, pie for dessert,

     Would you bake it in the oven,
      would you zap with microwaves,
      or refrigerate, or freeze it?
      Pies are  good for daily saves.

      Heroic, romantic, germanic...I LOVE PIES!
                                                     ----Shirley Smith Franklin

Anaphora Is the Opposite of Epistrophe, "Learning from Loose Ends"

Today's Napowrimo challenge, at least on the napowrimo.net page that I follow (there are others), is to write an anaphora, that is a poem to repeat the beginnings of lines words and/or phrases  from line to line, at least a couple of times, periodically, or throughout the poem.
Is the plural of anaphora anaphorae, or anaphoras??  I'll opt for the latter in the following poem.
By the way, epistrophe is the opposite (line endings instead of beginnings) of anaphora.
Symploce is a combination of anaphora and epistrophe, using both at the beginnings and endings of phrases or lines...Does that mean in the same line?  OR  in the same poem? Though this poem utilizes both, I don't believe it necessarily qualifies for the term symploce.  'You think??

Learning from Loose Ends

Anaphoras repeat beginnings,
Epistrophes repeat the ends.
If we could repeat our beginnings, dear,
Would it ever make amends
for stumbling at beginnings,
for fumbling beginnings,
for sad, mistaken beginnings,
for misunderstood beginnings,
among the glad beginnings,
or is this is the way it ends?
If we could repeat beginnings, dear,
could we have ended better friends?

                                ---Shirley Smith Franklin

Something About a Wall...

Today's Napowrimo suggestion (have I been in error, heretofore calling it a 'challenge'?)  is to write a poem that features walls, bricks, stones, arches, or the like.  Robert Frost writes famously about a wall.  Not wanting to channel his words, though I admire so many of his poems because I too write (or try to write) in a conversational style of poetry,

 I consider the walls in my life.
Are they walls, or simply roads not taken?
A theme of not quite making it?
Or an embarassing wealth of choices?
Is this the beginning of a poem?                      (Stay tuned, we will make something  
My mother left, with her final instructions,                                      of this theme yet.)
a poem about a rose and a wall.                     (We had it printed in the funeral leaflet.)
...something about not mourning a rose
formerly blooming next to a wall, because
"the rose still blooms beyond the wall."
My mother, ever with me, instructing,
encouraging, holding out possibility
beyond every wall, singing to me
ways to be
happy.
                                 --Shirley Smith Franklin

Can a flower actually grow through a wall? I suppose, if it were a stone wall.  Stone wall, now there's an image and an idiom.  Hmm. These days we have concrete and granite...if walls were such, would they admit a rose?  (At this point in writing, I go back to the foregoing sentences that hint of poetry and separate them as they appear, above, now. The italicized words are not part of the poem.)