Consider this: a white vase of red roses, sitting stately
upon a table, greeting the dawn, casting up its song
of fragrance. One day, a careless wind, an earthquake,
or an errant cat’s paw sends the vase tumbling:
prisoners of a reckless plummet to the ground,
the roses cannot stop their fall –
and the vase shatters into fragments and dust
that will meet and rejoin the earth it once rose from. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Prompt Poems
Poem for 2012
Can we crash through the ceiling
and rise like newly begotten dreams
to become sky,
transmute into fire to merge with stars?
Do we welcome this new year
like a mad conjurer pushing a pachyderm
up the stairs to a fifth floor walk up
on the Lower East Side?
Do we live in the elephant’s shadow,
waiting for it to fall or do we
cheer the madman on, hoping to resolve the past
while fires burn from the fallen brimstone below?
Do we live, shuddering, half-living phantoms
in a lightless, aphotic crevice of an ancient lunatic’s jaw,
crouched behind a broken, blood soaked tooth?
Or do we lift arms like wings and rise?
Do we greet this as a dawn, rewritten,
the old mistakes as erasures curling inward
and fetal, floating as smoke and dying in the newborn wind?
We raise signs. We shout refrains. We occupy
streets. We declare our sacred humanity
in the faces of endless jaws,
all of them boasting rows of broken teeth,
all of them leaking out decrepit and crackled souls
balanced barely on the edge of decay, bloated with money
and with eyes filled with Revelation death schemes. We weave dreams
in the face of the dreamless. We crash through ceilings
in the face of the weighted down earth bound
with leaden and sick bellies turgid with blood. We transmute
into fire to defy the burnt out ends of older days,
bleary-eyed and spent, exhausted from the chase of what
can never be found, coin-heavy and power-charged. We merge
with stars in the face of those that declare that Heaven is a figment,
or an insane man’s wish, or a wasteland not fit for
habitation.
Hear me, Oh people. You must know one thing:
ceilings only serve to hold in. They deserve to be
crashed through, torn through their bellies like paper declarations,
eviscerated to clear the dirt of sleep from freshly opened
Eyes. You must know that the stars can be
held in the palms of simple hands and that
dreams can be weaved again, re-imaged from
the rubble of broken years. You must know that
fire will not burn you if you become it and that
angels are ordinary people. Check for the
wings emerging through your back, for the power
to lift beyond ceilings and clouds that you never knew
existed. And as you move through this year, ever checking
your compass, eying uncertain prophecies
and promises of oblivion, remember that wings
serve to make their owner fly — and if you rise to
the sun, they will never melt away.
Written 1/29/12
© 2012 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.
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This poem was written for We Write Poems Prompt #91: Kissing the Ceiling (the image for the prompt is here). This inspired me to move beyond a mere kissing of said ceiling…and with all the doomsday 2012 stuff in the zeitgeist lately, I wanted to write at least one thing that would counter all the fear and negativity. I hope I did my task justice.
-Nicole
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Time
Click on the Image Below to Read the Poem. If you are unable to view the image, you may view the poem as a PDF here.
Written 1/16/12
© 2012 Nicole Nicholson, except for items in italics, which are © 1981 David Byrne, Brian Eno, Chris Frantz, Jerry Harrison, and Tina Weymouth. All rights reserved on material by N. Nicholson.
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This poem was written for We Write Poems Prompt #89: Respond to This. We were to respond with a poem to the following sentence:
“As the Great War drew to a close, a young Englishwoman wrote wearily in her diary, By the end of 1916, every boy I had ever danced with was dead.”
I ended up having two reactions at once: the first was to offer to dance with the woman to help relieve her sorrow and loneliness, and the second was anger at the horrors and practice of war — an insane, senseless affair which has no purpose.
After a little thought, I figured out whose response was whose. What do I mean? Well, if you’ve read this blog before, you might remember that I introduced you to Nick back in this poem last September. (And of course, if Nick is an alternate version of me, he has to be, well, shorter and heavier…but you get the point.) After noticing that a significant number of poems were written in a male voice, I first concluded that this was simply my animus talking. But after some thought, I’ve concluded that I’m probably bigendered — i.e. I have a distinctly male persona and a distinctly female persona (I won’t overload you with extended details, but if you want to knock yourself out, check out the Wikipedia link earlier in this sentence, or this link).
Sooo….both Nick and Nicole got to respond this time. Hence why the two sides of this (loose) cleave are labeled as such. I don’t know if I will label future poems as such, but let’s just say this was an experiment. I hope you enjoyed the read.
And a thank you to David Byrne, et. al., for the borrowed inspiration. The lyrics come from “Once in a Lifetime” by the Talking Heads.
-Nicole
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How to Dream
The #6 bus makes its paces through the town:
up Baxter Street, past Millege, up Sanford, past
the Library, past the transit center, and then looping around
to Hancock Street. Everything is slick from the
Continue reading
This Is Not Magic
I can’t explain how I do it
and when I try, I can only point you
to the canvas: there is speech which keeps
refusing to exit through lips and tongue
and insists on taking its form
as colored chansons upon a blank face –
Continue reading
Window Psalm
Leaf leaves the mother tree in its falling flight, descends to die in the earth at her feet. Leaf becomes soil, and soil becomes womb; leave the childbearing to winter’s chill and tales of a babe born and laid in a manger; selah. Tree becomes testament, and book is bound, its reflection white and glassy in the store window. Read the window, tell the tree to tell her tale in textbook and tome, story and poem, or Scripture born on a pale, thin skin; selah. Tomes of tombstones, one errant in the reflection while blurred winter wind and sky imprint onto the glass. Soil becomes tomb as another year goes to sleep, bedded down beneath snow, sidewalk, and an aging sun while rainbow lights color each cornflower Yule twilight; selah. Brownstones rise from the earth with aplomb while Christmas bells chime and call choruses forth. The choirs, the organs, and the digitally made song cannot reach the man, distant, imprinted in the window – distant and singular in this season of joy; selah. O glass, what more will you impart in this season of both ashen day and resplendent night? Birth and death pass each other with wary, cautious eyes, unsure of the true ruler of these days – is it the cold claiming our breath or the warmth of our hearts? Selah.
Written 12/13/11
© 2011 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.
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This poem was written for this week’s We Write Poems Prompt. My poem ended up being a psalm based on how the images in the picture called out to me and the interplay between them — and the words associated with them.
“Selah” is a word used rather frequently in the psalms of the Torah/the Old Testament of Bible. According to Wikipedia, it is “a difficult concept to translate”; it might be a liturgical instruction or indicate an instrumental break. Anglican clergyman and Biblical scholar E.W. Bullinger believed that it was a conjunction between two verses of a psalm, possibly to illustrate a contrast or a cause-and-effect relationship. The suggested meaning that caught my eye the most — and is how the term is intended to be used in this poem — is “pause, and think of that”, which is how the term is translated in the Amplified Bible.
-Nicole
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Without End, Amen
The gathering at the oak tree gazes up to watch
light breaking through the leaves in lucent blonde fingers;
hallelujah
through the gathering of leaves — the oak’s green sleeves:
a blind wooden eye turns, and the gifts slip through her fingers;
hallelujah
as colors race through the membrane sky –
the rainbow siblings salute us through azure as one;
hallelujah
past the rain, shed to call colors up from
the earthen membrane beneath us, where we stand as one
hallelujah,
and we send back the song as electric impulses,
voices carried through limbs and hearts alone;
hallelujah
is our voices escaping only in breaths and upraised limbs as
we each stand before You alone;
hallelujah
Written 11/29/11
© 2011 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.
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This week’s poem was inspired by two things: 1) “Hallelujah” by R.E.M., which appears on their latest release, “Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, and Part Garbage” and 2) the We Write Poems Prompt this week which suggested that we look at words in pairs and the relationships between words. The picture is courtesy of Rampaging Poet from Deviant Art.
Process Notes: I basically took the words in the order that they appeared and considered each two to be a pair (gathering/oak, color/membrane, and voice/limb). Once I did this, the images and the story began to emerge. Also, I’ve been listening to “Hallelujah” lately…it’s an absolutely gorgeous and inspiring track and it just makes me even sadder that they broke up…but at the same time it seems like the perfect song for an ending. The spiritual nature of the lyrics inspired me…I wanted to write a companion/answer that would do it justice.
-Nicole
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You and Me, We Know About Time
R.E.M., 1984
For Peter, Bill, Mike, and Michael
You were made out of
cinereal, coriander, and lemon;
sable, cinnamon, and indigo;
bergamot, ginger, and rose. You
spoke like a thesaurus and sounded like
troubadours, da Vinci, broken glass, microchips, and
guitar string nerves, ragged at the edge
and carrying too much current. You
mumbled and sang clarion from rooftops by turns.
All of this has been living in my ears
and in my brain, that attic that
holds everything and lets go of nothing.
Continue reading
Kittens
The cat: sky-gray and fence post slender.
Me: twenty-three and in my first real apartment,
in my first real city, outside of short term college hovels
with short term leases and cheap-ass furniture (not) included.
I found the cat while helping a (former) friend
clean out his house, junk-laden and miscarrying memories
like fruit, love, and children that were never meant to be.
A (misconceived) polyamory experiment gone wrong – and now
the house was being emptied of old photos, clothes, and
a barn cat hiding inside every shadow watching humans
flit to and fro with boxes in their arms. In between boxes,
I carried her away, too.
Continue reading
The Chase
Lord Dream from the Sandman Chronicles
Following you from dreamscape to dreamscape, I
cannot help but notice the taunt of
a quickly turned head,
an averted glance,
or a frozen neck refusing to turn on axis
to bring your eyes in contact with mine. I have chased you
from the steps of every illusion woven and constructed
from the vagaries of an attic stuffed with photographs
by a lizard brain that demands a coherent storyline.
Continue reading
Aluna
Stop, and bend your ear low
to the ground. Now listen: the breath is labored,
almost choked in some spots. There are people
who can read these signs like ragged, torn air
leaving the lungs of a tired Mother, and they say
that we are killing Her.
Continue reading
Saturn Return
for Amy Winehouse
The forever young are held in a pair of parentheses
made out of 27 years;
the ageless are collected within the arms of Saturn,
exhaling breath at his baleful return.
Each of you has a life cycle,
you all follow the same path from birth to death.
You first enter as a little bright light, a tiny pinpoint of sparkle;
you part the curtain, hiding as white dwarfs behind this
ringed gas giant, fearful of his mythical jaws.
Continue reading
