Tag Archives: death

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Ashes

Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath, courtesy of Wikipedia

NEW! You can listen to this poem on Podbean.

This was written for Read Write Poem Prompt #106: Repeat After Me.. Sylvia Plath was my inspiration for this poem, in which I chose to use one of Rethabile’s suggestions for this prompt, repeating an idea. Mine is almost a refrain I think, or variations on a theme. I hope you enjoy the read.

-Nicole

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It’s easy,
a burning half-morning light,
so faint that candles cannot even
make love with it lest they disturb the
shadow of amber that it drops onto the wall. And the
pen – there’s a certain rhythm to the
scribble and the scratch, the
hip-hop beat in ancient form
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Mutiny in Six Parts

This was written for Read Write Poem #82: Ode to Your Homunculus.

I borrowed heavily from concepts in Jungian psychology, Freudian psychology, and Kabbalah to write this — and thus it is a multi-part, somewhat lengthy work. I’ve been troubled by a lack of creative energy lately, so this work was a blessing to me. I hope it touches you in some way.

Oh, and by the way, enjoy.

-Nicole

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i. psyche

a hollow school room
looking like eighteen and ninety four
everything is wooden
and silent: open-mouthed chairs
wordless desks scrubbed
of paper and language
outside
the snow is falling
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The Egyptian

I wrote this for Read Write Poem Prompt # 78: Kiss Me, Amelia Earhart. I decided to approach this a little differently, as there are so many historical figures I would like to write about — so this is kind of a longer narrative of how one woman graces the lives of several. Also, I decided not to limit myself to the idea of love in the romantic sense — but it is here, as you can see in the poem. I hope you like it.

And BTW, I highly encourage you to click on the links for further understanding. They will open in another tab or as a pop-up window, depending on your browser. One can understand the poem without them, but after my first experiment with hyperlinked poetry, it seemed that this one begged for it.

-Nicole

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i.

green jaws
seize a brown body
clamp down
the crocodile is hungry
this young woman will do

white triangles
stained, dripping with red
color the Nile carmine
in this spot
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“Somewhere” Published in Special Edition of Poetry Super Highway Weekly

Tuesday, April 21 is Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), and Poetry Super Highway published a special issue this week to commemorate this. My poem, “Somewhere”, appears in this issue of PSH Weekly. You can read “Somewhere” at: http://poetrysuperhighway.com/ppa/ppa603b.html#fp10

I also read this poem on the April 19th edition of Poetry Super Highway Live. To hear the poem and to listen to April’s edition of the show, please visit:

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/psh/2009/04/19/April-2009-Worlide-Open-Reading

Stumble It!

Stumble It!

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Solo

Written for someone I know who just had a loved one pass away, I present this for NaPoWriMo#2: Stretch the Metaphor over at Read Write Poem. Enjoy.

-Nicole

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Perhaps I’ve come to embrace them, these

antiphons
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Resurrection

Whose Eyes Are These?
Whose Eyes Are These? by Nicole Nicholson

This was written for two purposes: 1) for Read Write Prompt #70: In Your Face (poetry, that is), and 2) a personal project.

The personal project is to write one poem per day for Lent (excepting Sundays). To help myself out, I have been pulling lines from other people’s poetry to jump-start my own inspiration. The lines I used to jump-start this one come from Jim Morrison’s “Paris Journal”. You can check out more poems I’ve written like this by clicking here. And be sure that I’ll be posting more of these kinds of poems throughout the Lenten season.

Now, enjoy the poem.

-Nicole

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Tell them you came & saw
& look’d into my eyes
& saw the shadow
of the guard receding
            - Jim Morrison

Darkness and storms in my eyes – but
I can see your windows clearly. So clearly, they

speak to me,

telling me of dreams pulverized – slapped
across the face, shoved face first into
dust, kicked until their bones cracked
and angels bled and cried for mercy on their
tortured behalf. And fantasies – drowned
until they died in twilight, exhaling gasps and then
nothing but a slow dying whimper. I know that
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The Nobleman

This was written for Read Write Poem Prompt #69: What’s Eating You? I decided to go the drink route and explored wine for this week’s poem. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

-Nicole

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to think that this wine
is liquid ghost –
grapes dying for our pleasure,
he thinks

as he takes another sip
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Ladybug

This bop was written for Read Write Poem Prompt #67: Share the Bop. A bop is a (roughly) 26 line poem with three stanzas and a refrain that repeats three times in the poem. The bop is usually structured like this (however, you can modify or expand on the form):

  1. Stanza 1: six lines, introduces a problem or situation
  2. Refrain
  3. Stanza 2: eight lines, expands more on the problem or situation, or continues from stanza 1
  4. Refrain
  5. Stanza 3: six lines, with the solution or conclusion
  6. Refrain

I had fun with this and plan to write many more bops. For the RWP prompt for this week, we were to either a) borrow two lines posted by participants as a refrain or b) write our own bop and use one of the donated couplets as an epigraph. My refrain (I want to fix you/I want to set your wings) is courtesy of Angie from The Space Between Words blog.

Now, enjoy the poem.

-Nicole
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Caught between you two,
I was a ladybug –
spread my wings, and I flew;
spread my wings for the two of you;
spread my wings, and I knew
your love. Now, I hear your voices:
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“Rainbow” on Poets Who Blog

I recently wrote a jigsaw poem for Poets Who Blog, “Rainbow”. The poem, written for the late Layne Staley (lead singer of Alice In Chains), is now up on the site at:

http://poetswhoblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/jigsaw-poem-four-feb-2009.html.

For those who don’t know what a jigsaw poem is, I’ll briefly explain how it works:

  1. PWB announces that there will be an opportunity to write a jigsaw poem, then solicits ten words from poets on PWB.
  2. A word list is created by poets leaving ten random words in the comments of that post.
  3. Participating poets write a poem using those ten words somewhere in the poem.
  4. The finished poems are e-mailed to the founder of PWB, who then posts the poem.
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Five Haiku for Grief

This chained haiku, though written a little late (due to a wicked case of writer’s block the last couple of weeks) was written for Read Write Word Prompt #7. Enjoy.

-Nicole

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signatures of death:
mirrors turn their reflective
faces to the walls

roses become allies
crimson, lie as sentinels
upon your still chest

blood under your skin
withdrawn into silence – I
speak in tongues of grief

while you wear mists of
the eternal, ancient lake,
I am wearing black

memories yield to
alchemy – reassemble,
and they become you

Written 1/13/09
© 2009 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.

Stumble It!

Stumble It!

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Dead

This poem was written as a (kinda) response to Rob Kistner’s poem, “Up From Hell” over on his blog Image and Verse and is for Read Write Poem Prompt #55 – Free For All. It is a sort of stream-of-consciousness piece, so bear with me if it meanders a bit. Enjoy.

-Nicole

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she walks in the house of the dead
house of the rising dead
dead house rising
dead house falling
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“Elegy” Published in Young American Poets

“Elegy” was published in Young American Poets on Tuesday, November 25! To go read the poem, visit:

http://youngamericanpoets.blogspot.com/2008/11/elegy.html

And heck, while you’re at it, check out the rest of the poets on the site. Some amazing stuff.

-Nicole

Stumble It!
Stumble It!