Month: January 2020

I really, really like this one. An Easter poem. Just wrote it yesterday morning and it fills me with holy energy and makes me giggle. I’m calling it by a subtitle here which alludes to a scene in Perelandra by C. S. Lewis; the actual title is R-rated and I don’t know my audience so I toned it down a bit haha. The last line is a quote from a movie that if you recognize the scene should also make you chuckle.

The painting above is another one by my friend Steven Moser (see my first poem post “Danforth”) … it is called “Resurrection and the Life” from a series of paintings called “I am…” I love it when a poem I write ties with a painting he has done. I think I’d like to try to write some poems just inspired from his paintings — that would be a good exercise for me…

WHAT HATRED WAS MADE FOR
The ground shakes
The stone rolls
And the arms emerge
An eagle on one hand
A dove on the other
The double bird

Now the face
Flashing eyes
Explosive grin
The light of a billion suns
It is finished
And can’t be undone

And the demon turns
And says
You arrogant ass
You’ve killed us

Haven’t posted in 2 1/2 months. Not positive anyone reads these haha. (If you do and you’d like to see more, shoot me an email at john@ichthusmhk.org.)

So my poetry writing output has slowed WAY down from when I first started in November 2017. I wrote 165 poems in the first seven months, but in the last seven, just over 30. Various reasons for that–some valid, some that reflect the constant resistance on the creative process that artists told me about. But I still love to do it. And I have thought happily a number of times of how fun it would be to take a retreat just focused on writing poems.

So I finally did it! Well, sorta. I came to KC yesterday for about a 24-hour period (scrunched some by having to take insurance claim pictures of my daughter’s vehicle that got speared by a Leawood snowplow recently–there is always something!) and decided to take maybe half of my productive hours to do poetry-related things. Not exactly a long retreat–but certainly better than nothing!

Anyway, I got tired yesterday before I’d done much, so I decided to take a nap at 4pm. Yeah, I then woke up at 10:30pm. I guess I was tired, eh? (I won’t even tell you about the bizarre dream I had. I did write a poem about it, but it probably won’t make it here LOL.) Anyway, I grabbed some lovely QT coffee and worked til about 5 am … and I had a ball. Such fun. Wrote about 6 1/2 poems, including one I collaborated with some friends on in the brainstorming process about a month ago, and I thought I’d share a short one inspired by a recent movie I saw. Enjoy!

LIVING WITH THE ACCOUNTANT
I like incongruity
He said with one of his seven smiles
If he’s willing he could like himself
These tender Mr Darcys
how do you pluralize that
please don’t say it’s an apostrophe
but I digress
Foreboding gray waters
Teeming with life
A world unseen
Awaiting a lover’s eye
Lest it die denied
Or dormant lie