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. |
Invalid Photo #1066529 Mornings Morning and unfocused vision, blurred by too much day, observes the ringing clockface through the hope of coffee soon. So the memory serves these icons, once the heralds of the dawn, but departed for the junkyard, percolator and alarm. Now the mornings sing of rumbling cellphone dancing in the dark, and the voice that hails the moment, “Hey, Google, turn on the coffee pot!” Line count: 12 Free verse For Promptly Poetry Challenge, Week 25 2022 Prompt: As per illustration. |
| Forgiveness Forgive and forget, I’ve heard it said, and pardon is for giving, a second chance before you’re dead and freedom for the living. Harder to say what you receive if forgetting is for getting, to lose the deed that did aggrieve seems reckless and abetting. Line count: 8 Rhymed abab For Promptly Poetry Challenge, Week 24 2022 Prompt: Forgiveness. |
Memories These echoes of the past, a personal history, in variegated stream of snapshots lost, memory lets them pass through eyes that know their myst’ry and a mind that knows both reason and cost. A face, a smile, a word, a moment perched on the brink, the endless cavalcade of time succeeds. Events seen and things heard, randomly picked, in they sink, to surface when happenstance sews the seed. Line count: 12 Form: Kerf For Promptly Poetry Challenge, Week 23 2022 Prompt: Kerf (12 lines made up of 4 tercets, syllable count 6/7/10 per line for each tercet, rhyme scheme abc abc dec dec). Notes: I found this a particularly hard form to use, not because of the rhyming or syllable counting, but because of the awkwardness of that third line being almost double the length of the first two. It seems that the number of syllables might almost have been chosen to interfere with any pattern of rhythm established early. And my poetry depends, even when free verse, essentially upon flow and rhythm (so it’s not really free verse at all, but that’s another discussion). The net result is that I’m not happy with what I’ve written up there but I can’t afford the time needed to get it exactly right (and I’m not even sure that’s possible). My apologies, therefore, but I’ll try harder next time. |
| Luck Once I heard it said by some buck that he would have no truck with luck; “That impostor,” he swore, “is no more than a bore and why else am I always stuck with the bad kind and left in the muck?” I agreed and told him it sucked, good is kept for the rich, life’s no more than a bitch, and we are the ones that get plucked. Line count: 10 Form: Sorta double limerick For Promptly Poetry Challenge, Week 22 2022 Prompt: Luck. |