Broom!
My son is
sweeping
the floor
with his
swerving
screeching
Matchbox car.
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Broom!
My son is
sweeping
the floor
with his
swerving
screeching
Matchbox car.
broom
vroom
it is all in the stroom
never mind the boom
elevation tooms
One fell sweep
And spider's silk falls to dust.
Still, dustbunnies creep like whispers
Forgotten, all whiskers.
There is magic here yet.
Don't forget:
Brooms once swept cloudfuls of stardust.
Now, in cupboards they dream of witches
While we dream of a decent night's sleep.
Haven't written anything in a long time. Poetry looks a lot easier than it is!
Great entries everyone. Pen, Melanie and YesNo delivering the goods as usual. Nice picture, Melanie, by the way.
Cacian strung together those rhyming words nicely.
Seaofmilktea, I liked the line : Now, in cupboards they dream of witches
Cafolini : Didn't really get those lines. Hope you will enlighten me on them.
But because I can't get those lines out of my mind, the winner is..................
Blank Verse
Simple words conveying an emotionally powerful idea. You took the topic to a completely different level.
Congratulations!
phoenix thank you and congratulations Blank Verse!! :)
Thanks very much, phoenixtears, glad you liked the poem and well done to everyone who entered. And thanks also, cacian.
If anyone wants to read a master at work on the subject, I can recommend Charles Simic’s ‘Brooms’, which begins: ‘Only brooms | Know the devil | Still exists’, and has other remarkable lines like: ‘A broom is also a tree | In the orchard of the poor’ and ‘The secret teaching of brooms | Excludes optimism’ – dark but incredible. I can strongly recommend Simic as a poet.
I’ve not contributed to the Minimalist competition for a while, so I’ll set the following subject and deadline, but if the topic’s been covered recently, or you think the deadline should be different, please let me know.
Subject: Mountains
Deadline: Wednesday 31st July, 2013.
Best of luck, and I look forward to reading the entries.
Balance
Eagles flight,
your voice
echoes
off canyon walls
here we escape
here we disappear
beneath the white
and gray,
beauty
which sometimes
means death
so the wind laments,
uncovering
unexpected
moments of joy.
Mountains made of molehills
Barriers created by fear
Let us cut the mountain down
Tear down another Berlin Wall
Practice war no more...
i like the topic so much i have here two offerings pieces i hope you do not mind :)
heighest
to highest mountain
the peak is sending
messages blending
signals of lending
belowing views
to valleys and hues
spectacular fuse
blending
the landscape
blends
valleys to mountains
balancing fountains
of mouth watering
source to seas
and corse
beauty is dorsed
Congratulations blank verse! Good poem.
Mountains mark our boundaries though we live next door,
Though our beds butt on one wall and share a single floor.
Mountains
Mountains
rise above
Breathe deep the
rarefied air...
and chill
7/27/2013
Ta ! (short for tarradiddle),
tailor STATELY
Mountains have seen
more sunrises
more sunsets
more thunderstorms
more rainbows.
Mountains are
God's cathedrals.
When a lonesome cry
out to the mountains
came back,
then why don't you?
Thank you to everyone who entered - there were some good entries and I enjoyed them all, including the emotion of the poems by Dark Muse and phoenixtears, and Pendragon's more political take on things (although I was slightly disappointed that someone from Blue Ridge Mountains chose not to write about them - too obvious perhaps? :)).
Anyway, the winner is...
YesNo for the metaphorical transformation of the topic into a simple-but-effective couplet. Well done.
Thanks again to everyone who entered. b|v
I agree! WTG YesNo! The metaphor was delightfully clever.
Congratulations YesNo !
Ta ! (short for tarradiddle),
tailor STATELY
Thank you, blank|verse! And thank you, Melanie and tailor_STATELY!
The next topic for the minimalist competition is Patience.
Deadline in three weeks: August 23
Swiftly! Patience -
abide with me
Steel me against
anger's niggle;
frustration's maw
Feed my spirit
with delight; calm
8/9/2013
Ta ! (short for tarradiddle),
tailor STATELY
patience
your name
has ancient
written to
mention
keep it
a function
who knows
what tension
may rouse
attention
Can you pause a moment
Can you watch with me one hour
Ignore the voices that beckon
Or is patience beyond your grasp
Hurry up before time runs out
Carpe Diem, that's the way!
No pausing or just waiting
Patience lies beyond your grasp
Heron
Stands. Is.
Reads the stream’s
free-flowing lines.
Reads. Reads.
Reads for meaning’s
sheen through eddies
of meaning.
A glimmer. A gleam.
The cracked church bell’s broken song
The moon, on a single blade of grass
Whirring clocks and running rivers
My mind, anticipating your return
My soul, a dog teased with hope of a bone
Waiting, waiting, patience rewarded?
Open books, closed hearts
No reward for these vacant thoughts
Patience?
Take a rock
and watch it
in geologic time.
She Waits
She waits
inhale exhale
but still the phone never rings
She waits
breath held
but no familiar knock comes upon the door
She waits
tick tick tock
and only silence
She waits
flowers wilt, tarnished photos, tattered lace
only dust and bone.
When I yell out 'fiddlesticks!'
white doves fly on down
many hit tips of mountain tops
one shows me a sun.
©M.Z. (Adolescent09)
anyone for judges?!! i think it today :)
Thanks for reminding me about the contest, cacian. It looks like today is the deadline.
tailor STATELY: I liked how patience was requested to come swiftly. It usually is needed right away.
cacian: I liked the last four lines the best. They held my attention on the "tension"-"attention" words.
Pendragon: Yes, "carpe diem" seems the opposite of patience.
blank|verse: Occasionally, I watch a heron just stand in place in a nearby pond. It does seem to be a very patient bird, but then does it have anything better to do? What it does is done gracefully.
The Highwayman: Nice description of patience unrewarded.
Hawkman: Watching a rock would be a good test of patience. It kind of reminds me of meditating. Nice minimalist poem.
Dark Muse: I can sense her frustration in how you described the waiting and then the final lines made me think she will be or has been waiting for a long time.
Adolescent09: I like the sounds in this poem. I don't know that it is about patience, but I may have missed it.
Thank you for all for the entries.
The winner is Hawkman.
This one fit the minimalist constraint the best although I enjoyed all of the entries.
Congratulations, Hawkman!
Gosh! I wasn't expecting that! Thanks Y/N & Pendragon. There's some particularly good poetry being posted in the games section at the mo - it kind of attracted me back. All the entries were memorable in this round, so thanks to everyone else for sharing.
OK here's the next one: "Reading Greek." You can do what you like with it, as long as it's minimalist and poetic :D
Deadline: midnight GMT Sat 14th September.
Live and be well - H
Reading Greek
Alphas, Omegas
Have to get to Vegas
Beta, Gamma
Someone tell my mama
Delta, Zeta
Babe I'll catch ya later
Epsilon, Phi
I'm waving goodbye!
Pendragon
8/25/2013
νυνι δε μενει πιστις ελπις αγαπη τα τρια ταυτα μειζων δε τουτων η αγαπη(1)
1 Corinthians 13:13
Ancient, modern, never through,
Love caresses, ever new.
(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1_Corinthians_13
reading Greek
is Greek to me
said tongue-in-cheek
read the greek
and feel the streak
remove the steek
unancient weak
latin is seek
Enigma
Trying to understand you
has always been like
reading Greek.
Reading Greek: Homer slays me - Achilles
Angst, an Homeric brushtoppling a near displayNo recompense enoughowed on a Grecian urn
9/6/2013 r.9/10/2013
I had originally used "an": an Homeric, but yielded to "a", briefly; the archaic def. for an = "and if" or "if"
The ambiguity amuses me. If anything is archaic, the original Greek is.
With forethought,
Ta ! (short for tarradiddle),
tailor STATELY
Oh Helen – beware your gifts
I have read
of Troy
What makes me feel
at home:
a merciless sun
on my coconut skin,
the perfumes of souvlaki
and ripe figs,
the periptero woman shrilling,
"Ti kanis simera,"
and the word ΤΗΛΕΦΩΝΟ
on the telephone booth
The deadline having passed, it is now incumbent upon me to thank all the participants who have graced this thread with their labour, before passing judgement. It’s a pity that one has to choose a winner because it always implies that everyone else has lost! Therefore, brothers and sisters of the pen, Think not that you are losers; consider instead that your efforts have been inscribed on a round table, that ceased revolving and came to rest with one to the fore directly before the hawk.
Since you have all gone to the effort of entering the fray I think it only right that offer some observations:
Pen: The first out of the blocks, always an eager participant! The rhyming couplets are fun, though the associations are at times obscure. Alpha Omega Beginnings and endings? Well I guess Vegas qualifies for that; Delta & Gamma are both forms of radiation to which Vegas might have been exposed owing to the neighbouring atomic weapons program; Delta Zeta well, I start having problems here, though the first is a brain wave rhythm, but I’m not so sure about Zeta - Theta would have qualified here ;)) but the significance of Epsilon Phi with parting lost me a bit. I am left with an impression of a frat house, though sadly not my favourite: TOGA!!! :D
Y/N: Although you gave us an epigram, we had to read a Greek quote to get the point. A novel approach, putting the onus on the reader to read Greek, rather than making the poem about Reading Greek. A cunning ploy.
Melanie: You certainly embraced brevity, although I do feel that you took it a little too much to heart and chose a well worn path. ;)
cacian: what can I say? This was so you!
DM: both you and melanie latched on to the enigmatic theme, favouring brevity, whereas I’d like to have seen yours developed a bit. I feel minimalism should not be defined by reduced length alone, though yours was certainly effective.
TS: I must confess I rather liked your preamble :) though the poem itself had me thinking of an old music hall joke: “I say, I say, I say; what’s a Greek urn?” “About five bob a week, I think.”
chirpy: This too, was brief and to the point, though one does not have to have read Greek to read of Troy… Nice idea though.
Dieter: If I’m brutally honest I’d like to trim your poem a bit. There are one or two elements which border on excess, but as a poem it is very evocative.
Gosh it’s is so hard to choose…
And the winner is – Dieter, because the poem took me somewhere. So Congrats to you and thanks again to everyone else for making my choice so taxing.
Live and be well - H
Hawkman thank you :) and Dieter congratulations!!! a well deserved win.