Book of poems written for the second and third years of the Promptly Poetry Challenge. |
![]() Poems written for Promptly Poetry Years Two and Three. Year three is four poems short of being complete but, having reached 100, I have run out of room in this book for the last few of 2023. This overflow will be consigned to the previous collection of Promptly poems, named Promptly Poetry. |
![]() Gannet Birds, you say? And what a twittering, hooting, gaggling crowd that comprises. Not easy to choose in that squabbling, fluttering mess. But here’s one, a favourite, a smooth feller of muted colours and fine gradations, yet starkly picked out in black on head and wingtips. A sour expression surmounted by an angry, glaring blue eye and hard he may be, being a bird of the ocean wastes, inured by life in that vast and pitiless expanse to the wing-tucked and aerodynamic plunge from on high to the dark depths and a cold meal of silvered fish. Not one for sentiment he, and ready to fight at the end of a long and arduous flight for a patch of rock on a cliff face of some lonely, storm-battered isle where a thousand others seek a nesting. No fear has he of this life of struggle, of the icy waters of these northern seas or the winds that tear at his precarious foothold on land; ‘tis all he knows and, if truth be known, there’s beauty in more than his soft, white colours and clear-etched face. His dragon eye has looked and sneered at death. Line count: 27 Free verse For Promptly Poetry Challenge, Week 21 2022 Prompt: Birds. |
| Acrostic Another game to play with words, Carousing with the verbal herds, Resting from their labours now, Only snores and wheezes they bestow. Shall we send therm all upon a quest To make a sonnet at our behest In Samarkand or far Macao? Cor blimey, that’ll do for now! Line count: 8 Acrostic rhymed aabb For Promptly Poetry Challenge, Week 20 2022 Prompt: Write an acrostic using an eight-letter word. |
| Pain Decides It’s the change in attitude, vertical to horizontal, a matter for gratitude, even though full frontal, these pains from every muscle make rising such a tussle, as old age tests the bounds, new limitations found by protests from the body at movement slightly shoddy or maybe just too fast. If ability’s to last, rein in impetuous wish, be satisfied with this; it’s pain will teach you how to navigate the maze from bed to upright now, turn mornings into days. Be happy you’re not broken for pain its rules has spoken. Line count: 20 Rhymed abab ccdd eeff gg hihi jj (it’s a pattern of sorts) For Promptly Poetry Challenge, Week 19 Prompt: Pain. |
![]() Home 3 We built our house on the edge, a layer cake of logs like books on a shelf stacked under a steaming cup for a chimney. On the far side of the mesa a rose tree grew, tall and holding its blossoms to the sun that hovered above in perpetual noon. In the distance we could see Mount Ease, so called for its resemblance to a chair with a band of blue tuff for a pillow. Square clouds floated in the unchanging sky, holding images of a dreamscape, the fruits of our labours on the carpet below. Line count: 12 Free verse For Promptly Poetry Challenge, Week 18 2022 Prompt: As per illustration. |
| Poet’s Lament Untitled document a blank page emptiness awaiting subject a pristine monument silent stage a play with no first act bedecked. Here’s to the uninspired the blank mind so vast in vacant thought without a notion fired bard gone blind all sparks have flown, all battles fought. This then my heartless foe write or die so goes his cruel insistence clear though streams of nothing flow (hear me cry) it’s of nothing I write, I fear. Line count: 18 Form: Tri-fall For Promptly Poetry Challenge, Week 17 Prompt: Tri-fall, consisting of three 6-line stanzas, for a total of 18 lines. The rhyme scheme is a,b,c,/a,b,c, and the syllable count for each stanza is as follows: 6/3/8, 6/3/8. This form requires little to no punctuation and can be written on any subject matter. |