Travels with Emily

The folks over at Tweetspeak Poetry cooked up a crazy, international incident last week when they designated Wednesday, July 17th 'Take Your Poet to Work' day. 
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I took Emily Dickinson with me;

We had breakfast

Then it was time

to head out to the yard....I put her in the pocket of my garden tool belt

She hung out in the crocosmia while I weeded and pruned

and echoed her approval at the fruit of my labors

(you can hear her, right?) --a pile of weeds and garden debris

then we headed inside so she could help me unpack boxes

(books from our bookshelves--

6 month remodel project--don't ask.)

 and we found her book!

And I took her verse and parsed it into a poem (sort of)

We are long past the pensive spring

and the punctual snow is but a dream.

Emily reminds me, mid-summer

that water is taught by thirst

and she should know about water,

writing as she did about frogs

who tell your name the livelong June

to an admiring bog.

God's creatures far and wide

appeared in her lines,

not the least of which - the spider

an artist, (tho' never employed)

or the bat with wrinkled wings

a small umbrella quaintly halved.

Oh, she had a way with words--

I've never seen her likeness since.

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All lines bold and italicized are from 'Selected Poems',

James Reeves Editor, 1959

You'll have to read to find out which ones are which.........

Linking for all the fun over at dVerse Pub Open Link Night 106.

Cacophony

The chickadees are arguing
using their mad voices
to fight over the millet
and sunflowers--
Here's a sweet 'chirp', there's 
   an insistent, "cuh, cuh, cuh"
and another voice--"chick-a-dee, dee, dee."

It's like a Bird Boardroom Brawl,
voices of different timbres and tempo
arguing about what's on the menu.
They sound as if they're starving, 
staking out their claim to dinner
like it's their last meal.

Then zoom! they're off
to another branch,
a new hiding place
as evening winds down,
and I wonder
did their mother send them
all to bed without supper 
because they wouldn't stop fighting?

Ahhhh, they may never 
get that millet meal until morning
after all.
~~~~~
Photo: (very small) chickadee on the horizontal piece of wood.

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Linking with all the inspiring folks over at dVerse Pub for Open Link Night Wk 105--

Happy Anniversary to them!