Tag: Creative Writing – Poetry

Image: © “Rainy Road” by Aelle (CC BY-NC 2.0.)

Author: Katharina Schwarck

“Worms” is a response to Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie’s ecopoetry that I wrote for a class on ecopoetics in Spring 2020. It is mostly inspired by her poem “The Spider” which struck me because it renders its true value to a spider, a generally strongly disliked being. It addresses the spider’s importance in the animal kingdom and humans’ unjust aversion against the arachnid (Jamie, 175). “Worms” follows the same dynamic of calling out wrongful antipathy and disgust. The piece deals with a young girl who, as opposed to her peers, is not repulsed by the worms but rather considers them her friends, more so than her fellow humans. I chose to play with pronouns; I employ several occurrences of “they” and “she”. On one hand, this opposes the young girl and her peers, from whom she feels distant. On the other hand, “they” is used for both worms and humans, eliminating their difference and bringing them onto the same level. The girl picks up the worms and tries to protect them, while the other children cry of disgust. She is angry. They step on the worms for the sole reason of being greater in size. She calls them out. The fifth stanza of the first visual shape is a reference to WB Yeats’ Chambermaid songs, the first one of which compares a human being to a worm

God’s love has hidden him
Out of all harm,
Pleasure has made him
Weak as a worm. (Yeats, 307)

I have reversed the simile in the last line and made mankind itself the vehicle of the trope. Humans do not become as weak as worms: for their contempt, they become as weak as themselves. The sixth stanza alludes to Goethe’s “Heidenröslein”, a metaphor for rejected love. A young boy espies a red rose on a heath and finds her so beautiful as to break her. The rose stings him in return, in vain, because she remains, however, broken (Goethe, 307). I find this image oh so representative of many plant and animal deaths, be it roses or bees or ants. The defence mechanism does not suffice against humans who are much more sizable than their fellow species. Consequently, humans need to take even more precautions to recognise and sustain other beings. I have juxtaposed the worms and the heathrose by making my poem “shud” the flower’s pain, giving the worms strength and protecting them from heathrose’s fate. The second visual worm takes the poem back from Goethe’s time to modern day. The worms still come out in rain, expecting no harm. In this stanza, a car kills the annelids, which echoes with Jamie’s “Frogs” (Jamie, 133). I have inserted internal rhymes in these lines; “flood”, “up”, “guts”. They contain plosive sounds which highlight the violence of the content dealt with in the stanza. This intention of drawing in one’s mind mirrors human blindness towards ecological or ethical issues. They are unmistakable, and yet, humanity often fails to pay attention to them. In the last stanza of the poem, the young girl is grown up. To mark this change, I have changed the preposition preceding the pronoun “as she” into “when she”. She still sees the worms, her old friends, and when her eyes meet their suffering, she still cries out.

Works cited:
– Goethe, Johann W. v. “Heidenröslein”. Goethe’s Schriften: Achter Band, Georg Johann Göschen, 1789, pp.105-106
– Jamie, Kathleen. Selected Poems, Picador, 2018
– Yeats, William B. “The Chambermaid’s First Song”. The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats: Volume I: The Poems, 2nd Edition, Simon and Schuster, 1997, p.307

Image: © ELLE

Author: ELLE

Oh, to be born a daffodil,
An emerging seed of sundust
Waking from a numbing sleep
Reaching, slowly, the promises of the surface
Gently crackling the thin iced reminiscence of a silent winter.

The silky honey-coloured petals
Gracefully introducing the son of Céphise
To the distant sound of foreseen decay
For Narcissus’ reflection can only last for so long
Under the sky of spring.

*

Oh, to grow under the name of a rose,
Cursed symbol of serendipity;
Bound to hear the countless selfish soliloquies
Premises to dissatisfied infatuation.
Forced to see the solitude glowing in eyes that once knew love.

Does dusk know that dawn exists?
For the rose surely is unaware of the adversity of winter
And the daffodil is ignorant of the pain of thorns
And yet, –

Image: ©️ “Ordinary Wooden Spoon” by limecools

Author: Anonymous

Write me a poem about the 
ineptitudes that plague your 
insipid character, that stumbling 
tongue I ceaselessly point out.

Or perhaps about the mild indulgences 
of an ordinary existence you do not
mention, in order to postpone your 
appointment with my reprobative whacks. 

But not about my petulance at the sight 
of you biting a whole, unpeeled apple 
(idolized alarmists have sensed a worm 
and aesthetes will gasp at those caving 
teeth: “so unsightly”). 

Nor about my lifelong sobriety 
quenched by inner quarrels. They 
leak as small fits cracking large 
wooden spoons, or soaring word 
bricks in lieu of dictionaries.

Write me a poem, implored the mother,
without writing it about me.

Image: © “Abandoned Porch Barn and Windmills 1407 C” by jim.choate59

Author: V. J.

Why do we chase light in the night and dark by day?
What’s sad is that to die suffices a day;

To live it takes eternal seconds of
Mad fight to break the flow of every day.

Some Summer’s late afternoon on the porch
Seems to be like dull or sun or Sunday

The dance of the wind blown out of the leaves
Gives a glimpse of what there was yesterday.

We own everything but what matters most,
We own the light; the night; the dark, but not today.

Image: © Gislain

Author: Gislain

I wish I was a ship Captain
To sail afar and leave at sea,
To run away and once be free;
To escape shores I’ve known too long
To realms I may feel to belong.
My crew will hear: raise the anchor!
Do not turn back, have no rancor!
Full speed ahead, to the unknown!
New lands out there have to be shown.

If just I was a ship Captain
I’d have all I dreamed of, for sure
I’d feel the wind of adventure
Swells up my sails and shakes my ship
And sends me on my one last trip.
To islands of the purest sand
Under sky made of artist’s hand.
New shores never by man explored
Of mysteries too long ignored.

I wish I was a great Captain
To seek far off and primal woods
Hiding magic misunderstood.
Remote jungles so exotic
Colors and scents are erotic;
Dazing taste of forbidden fruits
Bringing back to humankind’s roots.
All treasures I could bring back home
Once I would have finished to roam.

I wish I was my own Captain
So I could choose where I’d sail;
So I could write down my own tale.
With the night sky as only guide,
And my dearest friends by my side,
I’d stir my vessel off its path
And fight against every wave’s wrath.
I wished I was, but I am still
A shipless sailor that hopes will,
One day, be Captain by all means
Riding his raft made of dead dreams.

Image: © Andreia Abreu Remigio

Author: Andreia Abreu Remígio

I was healing my drought the night your glance got me drunk.

My sky had been a hue of black like a departing storm,

Months of digested desensibilization had me numb and sunk.

But you anchored my heart – and got me dry and warm.

Through sleep’s heavy throb… we now sculpt each other’s effigy

Beneath the gothic peachy light, to swallow me whole is your quest;

As for my hell-worthy purpose and heavenly urgency

Is to brace your beautiful body’s weight on my chest.

The stars I longed for when I was lost at sea, I now see

Glowing in your eyes. Mourning, I tremble and shiver

But not of icy cold weather – for I am carefree!

While certain that I will be holding you as rushes in the river.

Suddenly, my soft tugged sobs that rock our playground

Drown us of worries. Still, you anchor my heart,

And word by word the sorrows go down the drain.

The poets’ invisible string yet holds us bound –

Be assured – whatever the distance forcing us apart.

We’ll kiss the crashing waves away when we meet again.

Image: Grimshaw Atkinson, A Moonlit Evening, 1880 ©️ Coleccion Carmen Thyssen

Author: Roxane Kokka

Listen to the dark, fallen leaves as they whisper
In a tremulous chant that I have lost a love
Of which I could not place another soul above.
As in the hollow streets of sorrow I linger,
In the burning ashes of regret I wonder
Of the alternative actions I avoided
And of enigmatic passions I distorted,
Out of fear, out of anguish, out of bitter
Dread of something new. As the thoughts of solitude
Sting my knowledge of that which I could not cherish,
And all my senses, one by one, slowly perish,
I drift in the perpetual silence ensued.