The word for me is wings, you dig? I have been
looking for mine since I was twelve,
trying to fly solo, riding dolo on the backs of words
ripped from the tip of an ink pen. My hands
are stained with the pain that I gained
from stealing morphemes out of ink, but I have
no regrets – given the chance, I would do it again.
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Tag Archives: WWP Prompt Poem
Twelve Lights
There is the first light by which
the world began. Some say it was made
by a lonely deity peering into the void
and empty black – no stars, no moon, no sun,
no world, no us – and to dispel this loneliness,
he began to speak everything into existence,
beginning with light. We have guessed at his – or her –
name since we picked up chisel to mark stone or
tattooed our hearts in ink upon papyrus
or common paper. Some have even guessed
that the light made itself, pulling together
enough gas and matter to contract and then explode,
flinging dreams of stars, planets, and
little crowds of creatures in every direction.
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Midwinter: Sound and Fury
I.
Cold breath claws its way upward, talon over talon, out of a lung cocoon to merge with the dirty cotton candy morning. We listen to each piece of its lavender, thistle gray, and filthy white whisper the news of its exit. Beneath this flock of ragged, dingy daybreak harpies we hear the sun charging upward, chasing them away with its blazing, lustful tangerine growl.
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1 in 88, Nicole Style
If you’ve met one autistic person,
you’ve met one autistic person.
– Unknown
i. photograph
Somewhere in Winnepeg,
there is an icehouse with my name still on it. A
little colored girl with candy-coated braids stands,
buried under shushing layers of polyester and goose down feather,
hooded like a monk’s secret, pretending to be Eskimo
hand held by a bundled-up mother while
house becomes mirror. She studies
the flawless lines and 90-degree angles
where ice bricks become neighbors. Nobody
mentions puzzle pieces yet.
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Signs
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
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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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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