A Poem a Day

12/10 - Petals

Why do petals give their consent so leniently?
Wishing best felicities and the perfume of their existence
to entwine with those who dwell in the abysmal halls,
without the serene agony of music,
in a place without expression or significance,
with no-one to seize the tambourine of life and bring joy.


I went with the prompt today and by a process of closing my eyes and clicking landed on this poem by Spanish poet Antonio Gamoneda. I wrote out a homo-phonic translation and tried to create a poem out of some of the words and phrases that I found myself faced with. I was unsure about the last line, but to be honest, I quite like the idea of a ‘tambourine of life.’

The poem could have gone in another direction as my first few words read “entry into co op,” but I didn’t really fancy writing a poem about a trip to the supermarket. Not today anyway.

11/10 - Symbolic

You like symbols,
you search for them everywhere,
try to imbue everything you do with a disguised meaning,
hiding in plain sight.

Symbols in pictures,
in words,
in conversations
in tales thousands of years old.

Symbols everywhere you look,
in people,
in places,
in colours.

Like pink,
for hope, and those first tendrils of craving.
A drop of ruby blood in a glass of milk,
diffusing to the palest shade.

Like red,
for love and want and desire,
for hunger and obsession.

And like white,
for truce and surrender and the end,
the wish to be pure again.


I didn’t want to do a five senses poem per the prompt. I wasn’t inspired by it, and knew that in my hands it had the potential to be awkward, faltering, and not at all fluid so instead I worked on a poem that has been in my head for a while, based on a man I used to know who brought me flowers of different colours at various stages in our ‘relationship’.

10/10 - Gone

A smile fell in the grass,
without a sound, without much fuss,
nobody noticed its loss but us.

Kicked about by strange shoes,
amongst the soil and morning dew,
how I miss it when I look at you.


Today’s prompt was to steal a line from a poem and use it as your first line. I closed my eyes, flicked through an anthology I own and brought my finger down on Sylvia Plath’s The Night Dances that starts with the beautiful line “A smile fell in the grass.”

9/30 - Goldilocks Reflects

I don’t suppose you would have done much differently,
my main problem was the getting caught, you see.
They left the door wide open, so how was that my fault?
if they’d wanted privacy, well then they should have had a lock!

And as for the porridge, well, you’d have tried it too,
Somebody needed to eat it before it got too cool.
Fancy leaving breakfast on the table whilst going for a stroll,
I can be forgiven for assuming they didn’t want it at all!

And once I’d had the porridge I needed a sit down,
it needn’t have been a problem, after all, they weren’t around.
The breakage was unfortunate, and I’m sorry about that,
but obviously the chair was faulty, I’m only small, not big nor fat!

Once I’d got that far, I’ll admit I was just a bit nosy,
but if you were alone in someone’s house you’d have done the same as me.
You can’t say that you’ve never had a glance in another’s drawers,
Or waited till they left the room and opened up their cupboard doors!

The bed thing may have been foolish and wasn’t my original goal,
but I hear that a post-breakfast lie-down is incredibly good for the soul.
They say that when they discovered me, I didn’t even say sorry,
but you see I was in a terrible rush, and they bared their teeth at me!

So you can see how they overreacted, blew the whole thing out of scale,
I needn’t be subjected to such publicity or receive such terrible hate mail.
After all they’re just three dirty animals and I’m a lovely little girl,
how can you possibly take their side, when their hair doesn’t even curl?!

I was going to skip today’s prompt of writing in somebody else’s voice and come up with something else but I liked the idea of a fairy-tale character trying to justify their actions. I settled upon Goldilocks who I have always thought to be a bit of a brat.

8/30 - Walk

The morning after, I could barely move my legs,
the memory of our trek vivid in my stiff, aching muscles.
My shoes, muddy and discarded on the front room floor,
had been impractical, too thin for the terrain and length.
But the sun had been on our backs and a goal in our minds
and though my aches would fade, our laughter would not.


The prompt was about taking a walk. I remembered the last long walk I took which was my first geocaching experience.

6/30 - Ducks

I didn’t know that mallards rape,
that they chase and they peck and they force.
All of a sudden, since you told me that,
the park doesn’t seem so serene anymore.


The suggested prompt was to write about an animal. Ducks have been relatively important in my life. One of the things I most loved to do was to go to the park and watch the children feed them. I even have a duck charm on my charm bracelet to symbolise my fight with mental illness (for a long, complicated reason,) however, my boyfriend decided to fill me in on how male mallards behave when they do not have a mate.

This poem was originally much longer, with its final incarnation acting as the final stanza, but I realised that the rest was extraneous and it works just as well, probably better, without.

7/30 - Green

You don’t own a vase,
so the green flowers you brought home
were cut, rinsed and stuffed
- I never was gentle -
into a pint glass from the top shelf.

Over time, the water in their make-shift home turned murky,
a hue to match your favourite hoodie,
the one you wear like a second skin,
the one I moan about but hold close
and breathe deeply when you are gone.

When I close my eyes, I see you in green,
and when I pass the mirror, my hair shouts your name
because it is the colour of my love.


The prompt was to write a poem in which a colour predominates. This is a poem about green, my boyfriend’s favourite colour and one of the current colours in my hair (dark brown with green.)

Absense…

I haven’t given up on the challenge, despite my absence.

I’ve had rather a busy few days and I’ve been spending lots of time with my boyfriend who is visiting (long distance relationships are problematic,) so I haven’t posted. But the poems have been planned out and read into my dictaphone.

It’s late now but I am not sleepy yet and have started transcribing them onto the computer so hopefully I will be up to date shortly!

5/30 - Permission

“Do you check with your young man first?”
He asks, eying the colours in my hair.
He talks of permission, veto, approval,
his eyes moving from my hair to my chest
and lingering, tongue sneaking out to wet a lip.
I wonder if he asks his wife’s permission before ogling young women.


I’m hoping in the next few days to be able to write a few longer pieces. It’s quite unusual for me to write such short poems as I have so far for this challenge.

4/30 - Muse

Hair tinted like the glow from coals blows
in front of the merriest of eyes,
but I can’t look away from bare knees,
pornographic in the bitter wind.


This was written whilst half asleep in bed, after coming home from said Muse’s birthday celebrations.