There is an exit just below my navel
where the stars began: one escaped
and drifted low to the earth, riding the navel
of a cornflower sky to point its way to birth. Cocooned
inside me, your crowned yourself for entrance, robed yourself
to rival the night with red, flesh tone like the blush of sienna
that wraps my bony frame, and yet-to-open brown eyes
with double visions that layer themselves on top of each other: one from
the descendants of Adam’s dirt, and the other
from Heaven.
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Tag Archives: love
Big Tent Poem: An Open Letter to A Suicide Bomber
This poem was written for Big Tent Poetry’s Monday Wordle Prompt this past week. I decided to do something a little different this time around. I erased a couple of words from the original Wordle graphic and managed to use the rest in a poem…written directly onto the graphic.
I wrote this, inspired by Neil Reid’s poem, “The invisible human like a bomb”. You must go read this poem, which had a huge impact on me. It moved me to speak to her.
Click on the graphic below to enlarge and read. Feel free to print this, view it in another window, etc. Some of the verses are placed vertically because the original word I used in some cases is vertical in the original graphic.
Enjoy.
-Nicole
Written 6/18/10
© Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.
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WWP Poem #5: The Day Before (or, Adam Ponders Before the Elohim)
Adam and Eve Expelled from Paradise by Marc Chagall
Created June 3, 2010 by Nicole Nicholson. Original text used: “Pointed Roofs” by Dorothy Miller Richardson.
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This poem was created (I don’t say written, and you’ll find out why in a minute) for We Write Poems Prompt #5: Erasures, which comes to us courtesy of Angie Werren.
She directed us to go to the Erasures website over at Wave Books, take the same source text — “Pointed Roofs” by Dorothy Miller Richardson — and erase words at random: as many, or as few, as we liked.
I ended up erasing a good percentage of the words, and this is originally what I had after I was done. And I cheated a little: I added a pronoun, a conjunction, and a preposition to make the text make a bit more sense. Then, I played with spacing and line breaks.
It was a great deal of fun breaking out of my normal style and creation methods…just fun to play around and let a story emerge from the words. I hope you enjoyed this piece.
-Nicole
P.S. Totally unrelated, but my “Houdini” poem was featured in Thinkering, an online comic strip. Go here to check it out: http://reudor.wordpress.com/2010/06/09/escape-artist/
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Stumble It!
I, Too, Say Amen
This poem was written for Read Write Word Prompt #101: P-P-P-Poetry. This is a Wordle prompt in which all of the words begin with the letter P. I used some of the words and added a few of my own in this poem, which is inspired by William Blake (the quote in the poem is from his work “Proverbs of Hell”), Langston Hughes (“I, Too, Sing America”), and one of my own poems that I wrote earlier this year. Enjoy!
-Nicole
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I, too, say Amen.
I am having an early Sunday morning vision
of prophecy:
our bodies slapping together,
sweat running in rivers and casting shattered tributaries
off of our skins. We are somewhere
sequestered, and yet more sacred than the backseat
of my car. We sing Hallelujahs, composed in the key of carnal –
a polyglot of grunt, hiss, and shuddering breath
against a harmony of moan,
countermelodies of our whispered directions, and a
climax of screams in fortissimo. We sound
antiphons to each other, utterances in counterpoint
as we co-create again and again. This
is worship – and I, too, say
Amen.
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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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Yin and Yang
A Merge of Opposites by N. Nicholson
This poem is about me and my fiance and was written for Read Write Poem Prompt #77: Opposites Attract. Enjoy.
-Nicole
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Two trains, both traveling at
infinity miles per hour, the speed of
light, the speed of love – one eastbound,
one westbound. Now calculate:
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Love, Transformed
Love Canvas by N. Nicholson
This was written for Read Write Prompt # 76: Changes.
I decided to revisit the bop for this poem. I started out with the basic form, but found my poem a bit overflowing. Instead of trying to constrain it, I let it go. I kept the basic form (situation or problem/refrain/expanding on situation or problem/refrain/resolution/refrain) but I didn’t limit myself to three stanzas or the line count which is typical of a bop.
I borrowed my refrain from the song Crush by The Smashing Pumpkins. The original line was “Love comes in colors I can’t deny”. This was stuck in my head over the long holiday weekend, so I decided to use it.
Enjoy.
-Nicole
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first, your color was green:
trees, flags, and your heart shared the color of
the rebirth of life and atoms and
photosynthesis was your queen, resting royally
in your ribcage, exploding roses and violets –
the fodder of schoolgirl crushes and bad poetry
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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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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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The Poet
This poem was written using words from Read Write Word prompt #11. Enjoy.
-Nicole
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You set a book to my ribs.
Night after night I unclasp it
at the mirror’s edge
alphabets flicker and soar.
Write in the light
of all the languages
you know the earth contains,
you murmur in my ear.
This is pure transport.
– Meena Alexander
He reads lines. He reads lines pressed into
his heart from a book pressed into his chest,
the pages filled with magic molded with his
bare hands from tumbling, lucid, luscious words
a long time ago. His book, his lines – but he’d
lost his words when they tumbled out to sea.
He had chased them down, but they had looked back,
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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):
- Stanza 1: six lines, introduces a problem or situation
- Refrain
- Stanza 2: eight lines, expands more on the problem or situation, or continues from stanza 1
- Refrain
- Stanza 3: six lines, with the solution or conclusion
- 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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The Sun Has Spilled Upon His Face
This was written for Read Write Poem Prompt #66: Re-Imagine Your Life. I took a little license with this, so the poem isn’t about me. I took a little inspiration from R.E.M.’s “Country Feedback” (in fact, I think this poem could be an answer to this song). Enjoy.
-Nicole
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the sun has spilled upon his face
light makes enemies of darkened thoughts
evil musings
cruel and wanton
wanting to seize him and kill him
turn him into death itself
walking, walking in endless night
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