Tag Archives: writing

Poetry

EARTH TRASH from WORDLE

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I don’t own this image.

The game, starting officially tomorrow, May 1, 2022, is to use the words in your WORDLE solution to serve as a prompt for a poem each day. My addition is to strive to use the words in the order used in the puzzle. But surprise! On this puzzle I did a 2! If I don’t use the start word in the poem, that leaves me with only one word, the solution. Start word: EARTH, solution: TRASH.

Earth Trash

It seems we can go from
EARTH to
TRASH
In one long, slow step.

A very early hominid
stood barefoot
near a fire
and discovered
good
beneath the limitless sky.

A very late hominid
kicked off his Crocs
near a fire
and cut his foot to the bone
on beach glass
beneath a sky interrupted
for low latency internet access.

Poetry, Uncategorized

WORDLE PROMPTS

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I do not own this image. It is used without permission.

An idea emerged kind of organically on Brett Axel’s FaceBook page. The idea was to use one’s WORDLE words as prompts for poems. Further, we (at least three of us) resolved to do this daily through May for some potential book deal later. I put another layer of “rules” on the experiment in that I will endeavor to use the clue words in the order I used them in the WORDLE puzzle.
Book or no book, it’s a fun experiment which I have begun. This might be the first keeper.

Schrodinger’s Kitty

So, they threw me in jail
like a THIEF.
Locked me in a box
and left me.
Pitch dark, silent.
It smelled of tin cans
and ESTERS of cardboard glue.
No room. Could take no STEPS
left nor right.
I do not mind.
I take RESTS.
I admit, after forever,
I panicked
and let loose
lusty howls and
ZESTY yowls and
whimpering mewls.
With each breath,
all of what is/was/
may never be
outside the box
winked into and
out of
existence
.

Poetry

And Now the Spring

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And now the bulb is poised to pop.
And now the seed trembles in the soil.
The rhizome simmers sugars
Surging through cells to crush through mud.

And now the bud swells pregnant
And now the leaf grows shoulders in the bud.
The sun, the rain, the wind thrust,
All tremulous.

And now the yolk shivers in its sac.
And now the worm uncoils in a lurch.
Copulation is insistent and frequent.
The hive quivers its fertile breath.

And now the spring’s fidget returns.
And now the death must dither.
The rut is unopposed.
Even churches cannot begrudge a flower.

Commentary, Haiku, Poetry

Haiku for a global pandemic

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I recently joined a FaceBook group called “Haiku for a global pandemic.”  Once or twice a day I drop a haiku in that group. I’m going to keep a little collection of them here as well. I’m sure mostly they will be my own, but I’ll put up ones I like with author’s permission. This will be a growing collection through this period of isolation.

4/13/20
Cold Michigan wind

the morning after Easter,

trails strands of somber.
–Steve D. Marsh

4/10/20

My highest highlight:
The most yellow daffodils
Telling Death to wait.

–Steve D. Marsh

Nature, Poetry

The Parable of the Otter

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The otter floats, playfully aware,
on the currents and the tides.
She dives to examine
an interesting stone.
She turns it every way
in the sunshine,
floating on her back.
She flips it away
and finds another.
It, too, is interesting,
turned in the air,
maybe for the first time in a thousand years
or, perhaps, since last week.
It smells of the water.
It slips away.

She does not keep the interesting stones.
They would weigh her down.
She would drown in her sleep.

She darts to the bottom.
She pries a fish from a crevice
and returns to the surface current,
always floating on her back,
enjoying her lunch.
Sometimes she spies a clam.
She also finds the right anvil stone and,
again floating on her back in the currents,
beats the clam on the stone
she balances on her stomach.
It is primal and
it is dinner.
She releases the clam shell and the stone.
One plunges to the bottom.
The other rocks back and forth in descent.

Tomorrow:
different stones,
different clams.

Poetry

Go On (with a nod to Ezra and to Buk)

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lined in rows

Go on, little poem;
Go down the hill and get in line
With the others.

There are hundreds of you now
Trying to stand as tall and straight as soldiers
Holding fixed bayonets at the ready.
But most of you are small,
Bent little things,
Like a long rank of twisted teeth
Standing stubbornly in your sockets.

You are barely strong enough to stand
And give testimony
To how someone once lived
And raised you
In all your misshapen fortitude.

But, go on;
Go get in line,
Like old-time farmers
Leaning on long handled hay forks,
Gossiping at market.
You tell them
After I’ve gone.

Show them my crooked scowl,
My bent grin.

Stand, like strikers, holding aloft
Your placards and slogans.
Stand against the bullies and braggarts,
The privileged and the aloof.
Stand in line after I have lain down
And make a good bit of noise.

Memoir, Poetry

Bees at the End of Day

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When morphine slowed and thickened
my Dad’s voice,
he told anyone who would listen
about the bee colony
in his hospice room.
Back and forth,
they flew.
He said in his dry, dying-man voice,
“I think they are moving
from one place to another.”

Dad, deep in glaucoma,
without his glasses,
high as he ever had been in life,
watched bees
go back and forth
building,
while he was dying.

Two days before his death, Dad,
who was vain about his voice,
who some would say was vainglorious about talking,
who was not a conversationalist so much as
one who didn’t know when to listen,
used the last of his voice
to castigate my sister,
for a mass of imagined insults and disappointments
over a malignant lifetime.

She left in tears and vowed never to return.
Something sacred had broken
and it couldn’t be healed over
or sealed up, at least not in time.
The golden honey of her daughter’s love
had drained out
and was lost upon the ground.

When he finished,
and she had left,
the cancer took his voice.
And still he watched the bees coming and going,
tearing down and building;
he signed to me
to bring my sister back to him
that he might make amends.

I did not know how to trust him either.
Bees make honey
but bees have stingers.
And when they sting, they die.

For two days,
I went back and forth
to bring my sister back to my father’s death bed

And when she consented,
with steel in her voice,
and steel in her backbone,
and steel in her jaw,
I promised I would be with her.

He took her warmth in both of his paper-dry cool hands
And clutched her hand to his thin chest
near his heart.
He looked at her face and moved his rough lips
and though he was no longer taking water,
tears squeezed out of the corners of his eyes
and rolled backward
across his ears
onto the smooth hospice pillowcase.

That night, he moved on–
no more back and forth.

Five years later, my sister thanked me
for being tough with her
and for insisting,
although I don’t remember it
exactly like that.

Poetry

Eye Blood

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had told my therapist
about the chilling images
spontaneously blooming
in my waking brain,
like I’m trying to scare myself,
the image trying to be the whole
jumping-out-of-the-closet gestalt.
I had assumed
gore was intended to draw revulsion–
revulsion bound to all negative.
Until today,
the pictures became more
than the puzzle.

In real life:
blood clot headed for my brain
but gets caught in my eyeball.
I can see it floating.
It is deoxygenated maroon,
shaped like a large ant or
stinging, flying insect.

It is inanimate but
maybe wasn’t always.
There, a string,
a clot,
an antenna? on one end
waving in the liquid currents as it floats.
I can’t know if it is bad that it is in my eye
(and frightening to see,
let alone what that forebodes
for the health of my eye),
or if it is good
my eye filtered it out of my brain
and saved me from the stroke
I might have had today.

October 28, 2019.

Poetry

Getting the Story Straight

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When they get here,
Won’t they be surprised?

There was nothing we could do about Luke.

He told the story he was told,
No better or worse
Than any of those TV evangelists
or any journalist who has drunk the Kool-Aid.
Wouldn’t he be a piece of work in the blogosphere?
Or reporting for Fox News?
Old Rupert would get a kick out of Luke.

Journalists like to think of themselves
As guardians of Truth.

Luke says Satan invaded me.
But how could he know?
He didn’t talk to Satan,
And he certainly didn’t talk to me.
I’m not a primary source in his story.

The Truth, which needed guarding,
was something quite different.

Read the story again;
You’ll see what I’m talking about.
The teacher knows so much in advance.
He knows there’s this local contact guy
with a jar of water
Who knows where the group will eat the Passover.
He knows the house;
He knows the room.

During the meal
He knows he is about to suffer.
He knows the “betrayer” is seated at the table.
He knows about Simon (that ass-kisser)
He knows about Peter (that weakling)
He knows about the swords.

He told them to pray,
But I was there.
We drank wine instead.
And it wasn’t that “new” wine you hear about today.
That’s an invention of Temperance Societies.
They drank wine because the water would kill you.
They passed out.
He told them they needed a sword.
Anybody know what happens when you mix alcohol with weapons?
But he did heal the ear of that guy who got cut.

He gave me the final cue
To do what he told me
When he asked,
“Judas, are you betraying the Son of Man with a kiss?”
It was all set up the week before.

I did what he said to do.
I was just following orders.
I guess that’s how I got here.

But you don’t hear any of that in Luke’s story.
You think he might have omitted that part on purpose?
Family values and all that?
Then why the swords
and the ear
and the blood
and all the whipping
and scourging
and thorns in flesh
and nails hammered through flesh
and spears piercing flesh
and all that blood and gall and vinegar?

Matthew had it a little different.
He was more like the CNN of his time.
He tells it as though the teacher knew it all in advance.
(And he did.)
But he makes it into some kind of supernatural mumbo-jumbo.

Matthew did a little research,
But he didn’t get it all right.
It was only ten pieces of silver.
I asked for thirty
But they negotiated me down.
The price didn’t really matter.
A little revisionist history never hurt the drama of a good story.
And he had a little trouble with point of view.
He talks about how the disciples went with the teacher to the garden
And how they all fell asleep
And then records what the teacher said in his prayer,
Which he couldn’t know if he was asleep.
He was a disciple, wasn’t he?
And if he stayed awake to witness the teacher’s prayer,
Why would the teacher chew him out for falling asleep?
And where was I in this account?
Wasn’t I a disciple?
Wasn’t I asleep with the others?
Doesn’t that give me an alibi?
And he told this same story twice.
Doesn’t that give me two alibis?

But then I kissed the teacher,
Just like he told me to.
And then they arrested him.
And then the ear got cut off.
And then the teacher put it back on.

And after that, where was Peter?
Was he around the campfire in the courtyard, like Luke says?
Or was he inside the priest’s palace with the servants like Matthew says?
Either way, he was certainly the bitterest weeper of the bunch,
that coward.

But how does my story play out?
Did I realize what I had done
and immediately throw the money back at the priests
and go hang myself,
And then the priests bought the potters field, like Matthew said?

Or did I take the money
and buy the potter’s field myself,
then fall down and all my guts gushed out like the prophecy says?
Real estate transactions
certainly were different back then.

I don’t even remember,
It was a pretty long time ago.
But I know this: Luke wasn’t even a disciple.
He wasn’t there.
Just another reporter,
Like Wolf Blitzer
Or Geraldo Rivera.

All I know now is that’s when I exited.
And here I am.
Just waiting.
Somebody’s going to have a lot of explaining to do
On Judgment Day.

Memoir, Poetry

Grandpa’s Workbench

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Gravestone for Frank Roderick Marsh

My grandfather said,
“Always buy the best tool you can afford,”
and
“Don’t try to get by with a substitute.”

He didn’t own a pair of vice grips.
He told me he couldn’t figure out what they were for.
Anything they could do, he had a better tool.
He had fixed-span wrenches, boxed and open,
he had crescent wrenches in seven sizes,
he had reversible ratchet sockets
and maple handled nut drivers.
He had left handed wrenches,
specialized wrenches bent at precise angles,
wrenches with heads gamboled on universal joints,
and everything duplicated in metric.
He had pliers but I was never to use them on bolts.
Pliers were for compressing spring clips,
twisting wire,
for replacing hose clamps
and breaking dried plugs out of the spout of the glue bottle.
He always used WD-40 as a solvent, never as a lubricant.

His son, my father, was born in 1928,
just in time for the Great Depression,
and those tools had fed Grandpa’s family for six years.
He could no more throw a tool away
than burn a fifty dollar bill.

He had dozens of screwdrivers.
Some had broken or chipped.
Grandpa ground them down,
reincarnated them with a shorter shank
or transmuted them into a scribe or an awl.

Sometimes, on overnights,
after supper,
while Grandma cleaned up the kitchen and washed the dishes,
Grandpa and I would go out to the garage.
On his immaculate workbench,
which must have weighed 800 pounds,
he would show me how to raise a wooden curl as fine as an eyelash
using a spoke shave,
or how to hack out wooden handles with a draw knife.
or how to build drawer slides with a matched pair of hand planes.
or how to sharpen a plane iron on a whetstone and
how to de-burr the edge with a strop .

He showed me how to use my thumbnail as a guide
for the kerf of the crosscut saw,
how to use a bow saw,
a coping saw,
a backsaw.

He looked over my shoulder while his bifocals slid down his nose.
The wire cage of the single bulb lamp shone from behind him.
The smoke from his Pall Mall curled up past an eye, an ear,
into the light and the wire cage.

He never, not once, said, “Wait until you’re older.”