When You Left I Painted

I haven’t written anything for a while, partly due to laziness, partly due to the stresses involved in moving to Melbourne. Now that I’m here I’m relaxed and loving it and managed to push out four poems yesterday alone. Here’s one of them…

 

An Affair

So the 30daysofcreativity site entered my radar earlier this week, and I succumbed accordingly. Everything will be posted over at my Tumblr, here. This piece is kind of a crossover so I thought I’d post it here as well.

 

 

 

Without Words

I’ve had a busy few weeks again and am very behind on the prompts. There are more busy weeks ahead, so here’s a poem to tide you over until I can get back into my routine.

 

Afraid of Whales

It’s a wordle prompt this week! I genuinely thought I wasn’t going to make it but I scraped in at the last second. I didn’t use all the words. If I had, it would have been a “killer” poem entitled: Stab! Stab! Stab! Instead, it’s a poem about a friend who is moving out of home. She had a dream where her boat was sinking, but she didn’t want to be in the water because she was scared of the whales. Once I stopped laughing at her whale phobia, I realised it fit nicely with her current situation.

Out of Frame

We were asked to change our point of view for this week’s Big Tent Poetry prompt. To do this, we were to choose a portrait, and write about the subject from the point of view of the photographer. I chose this image of a concentrating man for the basis of my poem.

 

Fruitless Passion

The Big Tent Poetry prompt this week was about fruit, or food. A few years ago I planted a passionfruit vine in a pot on my balcony. It grew nicely, and every year it flowers happily but never produces fruit. Not enough bees I guess!

It’s sad to watch as the beautiful blossoms wither up and drop to the ground.

Flood

This week’s Big Tent Poetry prompt was to use alliteration to write a list of words, then choose one as the basis of your poem. I chose “F” words, because my home town of Brisbane was about to Flood, and when I saw footage of what happened just west of us in Toowoomba, I said another choice F word :)

The poem itself then grew around the “sssshhhh” sound I could hear as the rain started.

I wrote another poem on the floods for the POW prompt, which you can read here, you can view my photos of damage to my local area before and after the peak here and most importantly, donate to the Premier’s Disaster Relief Fund here. I live on a hill so we were okay, but people at the bottom of the hill weren’t so lucky.

 

Endurance

The POW prompt this week is “endurance”. I live in Brisbane, Australia, which is currently going through some pretty horrendous flooding. Luckily I live on a hill, so the most I’ve had to endure was the incessant condescending, repetitious news reports with all their emotional hype (and a few days off work…). If you only watch the television, it feels like the apocalypse is upon us. If you walk the streets, you see the reality – sure, lots of people are flooded but it seems like twice that many are hovering around willing to help out. Please note that only applies to my local area; I’m pretty sure Toowoomba and the Lockyer Valley have indeed met the apocalypse and the death toll from those areas when the water goes down is going to be horrendous.

Many of my favourite local haunts will emerge badly flood damaged once the water goes down and the carnage spreads across something like 75% of our state. Many people have water up to their gutters, some don’t even have houses any more. So pretty please, donate some money to the Premier’s Disaster Relief Appeal. I have taken some photos of the impact of our local area, but if you need more convincing, there are plenty of other shots from around the state circulating on the net.

And so, the poem:

Feet

So, I needed a bit of a break after NaPoWriMo. It kind of turned into an eight month break :)

On the plus side, I feel refreshed and renewed and ready for new prompts from Big Tent Poetry. This one is about feet.

Photography by Peter Johns.

I am the Hunter

Finally we’ve reached the end of NaPoWriMo – Day 30. Read Write Poem have given us a free day to write whatever we feel like. Mine is about losing stuff.

This month has been crazy, wonderful, inspiring and exhausting and I look forward to recovering for a while with my head in a book, then coming back some time in May to check out all the new prompt sites. Thanks to Read Write Poem for being so awesome, you’ll be sorely missed and dearly remembered. Thanks to everyone who provided the prompts – they were all great, no matter how much I swore at them at the time! Also, thank you so much to everyone who commented on my poems, it’s been really wonderful to have you around :)