Tag Archives: Poetry Corner

Poetry Corner – Description as Mood Food

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Hello Dear Ones!

Last week on Poetry Corner I wrote about each of us being the poem in our everyday lives. Expressing our individuality through our uniqueness. Taking pride in all that makes us special, allowing us to stand out in a crowd – even if only a crowd of one – ourselves.

I also touched briefly on my pleasure at reading quality description – stand alone paragraphs, phrases and poems that ignite the reader’s senses to flare into action. A well written piece can actually activate a physical response as though the body itself was experiencing the event first hand. Craftily complied phrases about food should have the mouth juices flowing. Expressions of tactile origin can have you scratching an itch or brushing an invisible spider from your shoulder or rubbing your fingers and thumb together as though that rose petal truly lay between them. Continue Reading →

Poetry Corner – Poem or Poet?

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Hello Dear Ones!

What do you think of when someone mentions poetry? Love? Longing? Beauty? Pain? Maybe even humour – particularly if you think of limericks:

There once was a man from Tumeric
Who liked his stew spicy and very thick
He sprinkled in some hot pepper, then more
Took a swallow, then swore
What he said can’t be used in a limerick.

The use of words is the storyteller’s and the poet’s craft. The tools of the trade are a writing instrument and a source on which to write. No expensive purchases or overhead costs are needed. The heart, the brain and a goodly skilled ability to utilize language is fundamentally all that is required. That’s it.

A storyteller uses his or her skills to weave a tale that captures the reader/listener and hold them spellbound till the final word. Description and storyline are essential. Believable characters are mandatory. Dialogue is optional. There is a beginning, most often a climax and then an ending to each story.

A poet has two options: to tell a brief story using the same structure as the storyteller, but in fewer words; or to take one descriptive element – what would be a paragraph to a storyteller – and grant it the grace of standing alone. Continue Reading →

Poetry Corner – Poetry as Play

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Hello Dear Ones!

Been doing some research on poetry to add to the scope of this post from your perspective – as a reader. My goodness, the number of poets who come into this medium with a heavy heart is dis-heartening.

Thought to lighten things up for you a bit today! Here’s a cute poem by Wendy Morton:

Streaming Flamingoes

Poems are everywhere;
starry, ephemeral, delicious,
for the eating.
Take for instance,
the cyclist
with a pink flamingo aloft,
streaming with iridescent ribbons,
a sunlit metaphor.
Or the skateboard guy
with a suit and flowering tie,
all grace and light,
simply on his way to work.
Or the gift of a recipe for pumpkin soup:
take a pumpkin,
fill it with broth,
potatoes, carrots, thyme.
Bake it.
Eat this poem.

Poetry can be fun! Take any topic. Add humour. Rhyme or no rhyme, matters not. Put sentences together that match, or mix lines up a bit for added flavour.

One afternoon when my son was four and a half years old, he wandered out from doing his thing in the bathroom and his trousers were down around his ankles. Here’s the poem that surfaced in my mind and onto the page:

Oh little boy at half past four
with trousers dragging on the floor
the bathroom may now be a chore
yet every day I love you more.

Haiku poems are simple three line poems and can be fun ways of capturing emotions more expressive than a mere sentence. Cinquain poems are five-lines. Click here for a few examples of other easy styles to use.  Check out the List poem style. Here’s one of my own personal five line favourites (though it’s not a cinquain as the syllable and word count don’t match the formal style):

Sunset symphony
scents of cedar
and fresh mown grass
titillate the senses.
I’m smiling!

There was a day when I had a poetic inspiration to write a poem about writing poems and, yikes! a writer’s worst nightmare – no working pen in my purse to capture the thoughts before they dissipated like fog at sun’s rise. Anyone watching me would have wondered what possessed me – I was quite frantically attempting to find something in my purse that I could use as a writing tool. I was ready to use my lipstick tube when I recalled having been to an art store a few weeks before to purchase a turquoise pen.  No turquoise pens were there to be found. What they had were artist brush pens in different shades of blue than what I had in mind, yet I was moved to buy one and put it in a zippered compartment that I never normally use. With a huge feeling of relief at finally finding a creative tool, this was the resulting poem recorded that day:

Poem as Art

What is this?
A poet without a pen?
Glad tidings be
That fancy marker
Grace my person
And my purse
To allow the artistry
Of words
The creation of phrase
The lyric of tongue
To unfold in indian ink
Peacock blue
Upon lined page
As yet empty
Awaiting breathlessly
The touch
Of the artist’s stroke.

No topic is too simple or foolish or too often written about by others to be written about by you if you are inspried to do so from a creative and playful bent. If you find magic in the world around you, anything and everything can be your inspiration!

Clouds

White clouds growing
changing in the east
building
expanding
as though the Ghostbuster’s
Marshmallow Man
was very slowly
arising
stretching
up and out
from a long held
crouch.

Here’s an exercise for you if you’re so inspired to indulge:

Below I’m going to give you the description of someone I saw one day last summer. I would encourage you to write a poem – or several poems if inclined – about this individual. Be playful. Be inventive. Trust the words that come to your mind. Write them down no matter how foolish!

Don’t edit what words you hear in your head before you write them out, and don’t edit them once they’re on the page. Never use an eraser! Never use the delete key! Once words have been removed, you can’t get those thoughts and inspirations back. And trust me, some of my worst phrases or sentences may have been inappropriate for the piece I was working on at the time, yet – lo and behold – I found them to be modifiable and ideal for something else along the way!

Here’s the description:

*an 80 something woman with long ringletted hair, wearing a  sun-faded yellow, broad brimmed hat with wilted blue silk flowers. She sports an aged gingham print summer dress hiked to her knees, showing off her rolled-down support hose while riding a rust-red bicycle. She hums a tune that has her smiling. Though you do not recognize the tune,  imagine it to be … any tune you choose.  Possibly: K-K-K-Katie, Beautiful Katie, You’re the only G-G-G-Girl that I adore … Or maybe: Barney Google, with the goo-goo-googly eyes, Barney Google with a wife who’s twice his size … ( yes, those really were songs that were popular in her day!)

Now, make a poem from the above as it inspires you. Make it playful, fanciful, light, loving. Yes, you can make it sad if you are so moved … yet my hope for your expansion today would be to show you how easy it can be to become poetic – in every aspect of your life, from the frying pan’s sizzle to the awe of dew drops on the first crocuses of Spring – and to do it playfully as a child might.

Here are a few examples from my own inspiration:

The yellow hat brim flapped and flapped
Against her cheek it slapped and slapped
The bicycle chain it tapped and tapped
As the old woman hummed a tune.

Or how about?

The blue flower wilted, drooping sadly
Rolled support hose retracting badly
Little old lady peddling madly
Humming gladly.

Or this one?

Yellow hat and wilted flower
Hair in ringlets a winded mess
Support hose rolled beneath the knees
Above the knees a gingham dress.

I’ll leave you now with, hopefully, inspirations floating around in your own mind. Go find that pen and some paper or open up your word processor and have fun!

Once done, if you care to send your results on to me through our comments option below, I’d love to read them! Let me know if it would be okay for me to publish here what you send me – I will honour your request – even if it means publishing it anonymously or with your first name only!

Happy poeming!!!!!

In Light and Laughter,

Marcia

Marcia’s Meanderings – Light & Joy

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Hello Dear Ones! Glad you stopped by…

The past two posts: Poetry Corner and He Says/She Says have focused on the topics of Light & Joy and Being the Light. This mind of mine was enjoying the energy from these inspirational topics. As a result my meanderings today are still being directed to the subject. Perusing my book shelf for something solid to consider and discuss had me opening texts at random. Eckhart Tolle’s book A New Earth was the hands down winner.

Rather than attempting to paraphrase Tolle’s work, I thought to inspire you from the master himself. (Please note the italics are mine.)

When you say, I enjoy doing this or that, it is really a misperception. It makes it appear that the joy comes from what you do, but that is not the case. Joy does not come from what you do, it flows into what you do and thus into this world from deep within you. The misperception that joy comes from what you do is normal, and it is also dangerous, because it creates the belief that joy is something that can be derived from something else, such as an activity or thing. You then look to the world to bring you joy, happiness. But it cannot do that. This is why many people live in constant frustration. The world is not giving them what they think they need.

Then what is the relationship between something that you do and the state of joy? You will enjoy any activity in which you are fully present, any activity that is not just a means to an end. It isn’t the action you perform that you really enjoy, but the deep sense of aliveness that flows into it. That aliveness is one with who you are. This means that when you enjoy doing something, you are really experiencing the joy of Being in its dynamic aspect. That’s why anything you enjoy doing connects you with the power behind all creation.

The majority of my days and the hours within those days are filled to overflowing with joy in all I do, those with whom I interact and in all encounters wherever I am in any and every given moment. It is exciting, then, when I see Tolle describing the feelings I have, that the joy is coming from within me – rather than me looking to find joy from those around me and the things that I do. It explains so much. Source fills me with the gift of joy, the light of my being radiates out, touched with the joy of Source and illuminates me, those I interact with, and the chosen corner of this physical world we are experiencing. Rather than looking to find joy outside of myself and to soak it into me as a sponge would draw in water, the joy comes from inside of me – and it is unlimited. A sponge is limited in its ability to absorb. Excess dribbles out ineffectually. Joy radiating out from within is unlimited and reaches out to all within its scope. The gift of knowing the joy within, of watching the effect it has on those with whom I connect, fills me to overflowing with the greatest and deepest sense of rightness. The more I live my life in this fashion, the deeper the sense of joy – the richer the gift that I and those around me are blessed to experience.

Selfish? Not entirely – though there is that aspect to it. The more joy I allow in, the greater the joy I feel. The greater the joy I feel, the more I am able to share. The more I share, the happier I am and the richer my relationships and life experiences. It becomes a cyclical spiral of energy feeding in upon itself and moving the spiral upwards, higher and higher into the furtherence of more and more joy.

I stated above that the majority of my days and the hours within those days are lived from this place of joy lived outward into my reality. I’m not perfect at it. Better and stronger and more at ease with the connection to this way of being, yet not perfect. It is now easier and easier, though, to recognize those moments when I am not living life from a place of joy – of concious choice to be happy and to fill myself up from within with the power of Source – God, the Universe, All That Is. I get a gnawing feeling within my being – it feels like fear – that antsy, restless, nervous sensation that something’s not right. I get this odd churning near my solar plexus that is trying to convince me that I should be afraid of something. When I look at it, I realize there is no logical reasoning for such an emotion to be filling me up with trepidation. There is no anger inside me. Anger, for me, is a misguided response to the deeper and truer emotion of fear. It is almost as though I’m a little girl and I have an angry parent near me. Not knowing what I may have done wrong to cause them to be angry, I have a sense that I am about to be spanked or punished for something in which I took no part. It is the frightened little girl feeling that tells me that I am not connected to Source, not living from a place of joy.

Holding on to this feeling only feeds the feeling and leaves me weak and vulnerable and of no use to myself, let alone anyone outside of me. I get jittery, begin to question whatever I’m doing in the moment and have even second guessed myself to the point of immobility. It has taken many years of trial and error, questioning and listening to myself, and my Self, to help me to be aware of this feeling and to know what it is I can do to let it go.

What is it that works for me? I smile. I smile at myself. I smile at my Self. Knowing myself to be a perfect child of the Universe – not a human child with baggage carried into adulthood – is what has me remembering that I am a being of light. My inner light – like the light of a single candle – is perfect in its unique beauty. My inner light, like that of a candle, dances and flickers with its own personal response to the world around it. Put two or more candles together in the same room and none of them responds the same way as the others. Each dances and undulates and flickers to a beat, a flow, a reality of its own. So too does the light within each of us. We dance our own joyous dances moved by the music, the flow of the Source of Universal energy bubbling up from within us as we allow it to fill us and to radiate out to the world.

Knowing how amazingly wonderful I feel when I am connected to Source, how could I possibly want to return to the feelings of human weakness of fear and insecurity? Yet it does happen – the return to those yucky feelings. Oddly it can sometimes take hours for me to recognize that I’ve returned to this place of emptiness and restless lacking. Though I seldom go back to my past  in thought – it may be helpful now in the sharing to tell you it used to take me months to get beyond this feeling of fear and restlessness. There was even a time when I spent years living in this zombie-like state. I shudder at the remembered life before this one.

Today, the joy I feel in the knowing that I now have it within my ability to release that restricting series of limiting emotions adds to the joy of my days and the minutes and hours of those days! The source of that power, that ability is not mine. It is in drawing the joy, the light and the love of Source, of God, of the universal love of All That Is up from within myself and allowing it to first fill me and then to radiate out through my eyes, my words, my actions.

Light and Joy. What a way to live!

In Light and Laughter and Love,

Marcia

Poetry Corner – Being the Light

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This week Mike and I have been discussing the subject of being the light – radiating our own inner light out to the world around us. It may, or may not, become a topic for our next He Says/She Says post … yet it sparked my search for poetry related to light and joy in life. I was quickly successful when I picked up a recent ‘find’ at my very favourite Victoria book store – Russell Books.

From Gifts from a Course in Miracles:

Light and Joy

You are the light of the world.

The light is in you.
Darkness can cover it,
but cannot put it out.

Why wait for Heaven?
Those who seek the light
are merely covering their eyes.
The light is in them now.
Enlightenment is but a recognition,
not a change at all.

There is no difference
between love and joy.

Joy has no cost.
It is your sacred right.

You can exchange all suffering
for joy this very day.
Practice in earnest,
and the gift is yours.

In Light and Laughter,

Marcia

He Says, She Says…

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Greetings:  Well, we’re now into our second month of having our blog site, of being ‘citizen journalists’, and this process has opened many different doors for us both.  With that in mind we thought we’d tackle the idea of what this means to each of us, taking on the subject of ‘Social Networking’.

Follow these links to read what He Says/She Says: Marcia’s View / Mike’s View

Poetry Corner – moving into 2010

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Dear Ones,

Last week’s Poetry Corner honoured women poets and their Christmas poems. This week, so close to New Year’s Eve, I thought to offer the same honour to the male poet counterparts. Alas, there were such sad, depressing and angry poems written by the men that I had a hard time finding any poems at all that resonated with optimism and the love of the past year going and expressing excited potential of the year newly to arrive. All, that is, but the one I’ve recorded below by Robert W. Service – whose last stanza fit the very mood I hoped to create as the baton of love changes hands to another year of possibility:

The Passing of the Year

  

by Robert W. Service
Jan. 16, 1874 – Sept. 11, 1958
 
My glass is filled, my pipe is lit,
My den is all a cosy glow;
And snug before the fire I sit,
And wait to feel the old year go.
I dedicate to solemn thought
Amid my too-unthinking days,
This sober moment, sadly fraught
With much of blame, with little praise.

Old Year! upon the Stage of Time
You stand to bow your last adieu;
A moment, and the prompter’s chime
Will ring the curtain down on you.
Your mien is sad, your step is slow;
You falter as a Sage in pain;
Yet turn, Old Year, before you go,
And face your audience again.

That sphinx-like face, remote, austere,
Let us all read, whate’er the cost:
O Maiden! why that bitter tear?
Is it for dear one you have lost?
Is it for fond illusion gone?
For trusted lover proved untrue?
O sweet girl-face, so sad, so wan
What hath the Old Year meant to you?

And you, O neighbour on my right
So sleek, so prosperously clad!
What see you in that aged wight
That makes your smile so gay and glad?
What opportunity unmissed?
What golden gain, what pride of place?
What splendid hope?  O Optimist!
What read you in that withered face?

And You, deep shrinking in the gloom,
What find you in that filmy gaze?
What menace of a tragic doom?
What dark, condemning yesterdays?
What urge to crime, what evil done?
What cold, confronting shape of fear?
O haggard, haunted, hidden One
What see you in the dying year?

And so from face to face I flit,
The countless eyes that stare and stare;
Some are with approbation lit,
And some are shadowed with despair.
Some show a smile and some a frown;
Some joy and hope, some pain and woe:
Enough!  Oh, ring the curtain down!
Old weary year! it’s time to go.

My pipe is out, my glass is dry;
My fire is almost ashes too;
But once again, before you go,
And I prepare to meet the New:
Old Year! a parting word that’s true,
For we’ve been comrades, you and I —
I thank God for each day of you;
There! bless you now!  Old Year, good-bye!

  

And since this is my blog spot I get to choose one final poem of the year. One of my own, commemorating the departure of the old year and the honouring of the new:

Ode to New Year’s Day

by Marcia Mae Nelson Pedde

Today we smile in celebration of the new
Let go the past to better see the future view
Behold what can be, shall be, will
Emblazoned by desire beating still
And fearing failure never more
Stepping boldly through the door
Into the realm of quantum realm
Perfection

Happy New Year Everyone.

May you bring to 2010 every opportunity for the most amazing year … filled to overflowing with not merely the potential but the realization of dreams come true. Allow in all that is good. Live your highest excitement each and every moment of your day. Laugh and love and play and create. Be the best you in all your precious moments.

In Light & Laughter & Love,

Marcia