Health Care / First responders

How about Poetry Post Cards to Health Care Workers, First Responders, Grocery Store Workers, whomever you can think of who needs a hug with words, etc.

To our fellow writers, artists, friends etc.,
Let’s pitch in and help our Postal Service, Workers, and create a two-fold benefit to the USPS and uplifting inspiration to others here and all over the world, as I have taught many times in my workshops, write, decorate and send out a poetry postcard, lots of them, your own poems, stanzas from poets you love, inspiring quotes from artists, musicians, philosophers, writers, dancers, etc, break out the crayons or plain old ink pen and write, then draw a flower or some hearts, a happy face, whatever floats your words to a higher level.

How about Health Care Workers, First Responders, or one in Italian? Or Spanish, or whatever other language your friend may speak.

And pass this project on, share your creativity with everyone you can, and get others to send poetry postcards too. Let’s make it a national, international uplifting project by poets and writers, artists, loving human beings. This is the Poetry Postcard Project of our bookstore, Hooked on Books.

So start your pens and write and send out your poetry, inspiring post cards.

Bonus: Send an email to me at jimciletti@comcast.net. Include your postal address, and ask me for one, and I will send a poetry postcard to you.

Hugs to all. Scribe on. Jim and Mary,
Hooked on Books Bookstore, Colo. Spgs

Poetry Postcard

To my Fellow Scribes, Friends, Readers of my blog,
Let’s pitch in and help our Postal Service, Workers, and create a two-fold benefit to the USPS and uplifting inspiration to others here and all over the world, as I have taught many times in my workshops, write, decorate and send out a poetry postcard, lots of them, your own poems, stanzas from poets you love, inspiring quotes from artists, musicians, philosophers, writers, dancers, etc, break out the crayons or plain old ink pen and draw a flower or some hearts, a happy face, whatever floats your words to a higher level.

And pass this project on, share your creativity with everyone you can, and get others to send poetry postcards too. Let’s make it a national, international uplifting project by poets and writers, artists, loving human beings. This is the Poetry Postcard Project of our bookstore, Hooked on Books.

So start your pens and write and send out your poetry, inspiring post cards.

Bonus: Send an email to me at jimciletti@comcast.net. Include your postal address, and ask me for one, and I will send a poetry postcard to you.

Hugs to all. Scribe on. Jim and Mary, Hooked on Books Bookstore, Colo. Spgs.

Scent of Dirt

Dirt, yes dirt. Neither caviar
Nor ambrosia. . . But
Earthworms know.

In mother’s lap

Twilight, evening lays its head down
To mother’s lap — her song of mourning
Raises the arms of bare branched trees
In supplication for peace for all — all
Who are dying because our President refused
To order the manufacture and use of
Tests.

Waiting for robins

. . . And oUtside our window the bare branched trees seem
Seem to be holding their breath not wanting
To show off their bright and
Beautiful new green dresses —
as we subside below the surface of fear —
Yet the very sight we need to see
Is all the hope we’ll feel when
The trees sprout green
Ice melts the rivers of frozen fears
And we hear streams of song
From robins singing to us.

Oh,

Robin in the tree
Reflected in the water
Black cat lunges, splash.

Why Neruda?

I have been asked, “Why do you love the poetry of Neruda.” Let me give the shortest answer, in conversation with my beloved Mary, I said, referring to mankind in general, “We go through life and never really know one another, because, fearfully, we never learn how to be truly intimate with one another. We pigeonhole “intimacy” with love and sex, with the depth of our feelings relegated to Hallmark cards and a box of chocolate.”

Leap now to Neruda, his Odes. How intimate he is about a gift of socks, the flavorfilled lemons, onions, garlic. Do we dare celebrate such feelings in our poems. Neruda’s poems, their intimacy does not pour out of Ego. They arise and issue forth from our new brain, his heart and mind, fearlessly daring us to first of all, experience and allow our deepest true feelings to surface within us, ooze out like a drug into every pour of our being, allow the feelings to morph to our language and find there the “Emotional Intelligence” that will blossom in our fingertips and type or script poems that, leaving aside ego and fear of what others will think of us, celebrate, egoless, the microcosm of intimacy from our soul.

“Do I dare to eat a peach?” Or do I dare to let people see the smile on my face, the hair rising on my head, the light passionate in my eyes, as peach juice runs down my chin.”

Neruda’s Odes are not about Neruda.

I leap now to Issa, lover of all creatures small. Big Snow flakes fluttering down onto the lounge chair on the patio. I watch them, remember so we’ll and hear Robert Bly’s resonating voice seduce me with Issa’s final Haiku. “This snow, it too is from heaven.”

Neruda, Issa, passionate intimacy, I love you. Amen.

Poetry Out Loud

I encourage my fellow readers and poets and all to go to Poetry Out Loud and bring up the hundreds of poems students may choose for their poetry presentation. Today I will be coaching a student who has selected a Stephen Dunn poem, Always Something More Beautiful.

The third stanza opens with:

I had come to believe what’s beautiful
had more to do with daring
to take yourself seriously, to stay
The course, whatever the course may be.

Sooooooooooo my fellow poets, writers, when we
Feel as though what we have to say falls on deaf ears,
Stay the course, dare, dare to sing your words
From your mind and heart. Feel your words starting in
Your feet and rising up through your legs
Your words swelling in your abdomen,
Flushing up and up to your beet red face
And down your arm as you watch your words
Flow out of your fingertips through pen or keyboard
To shake the world because you believe, “that what’s beautiful has more to do with daring to take yourself seriously.”

Write On, Amen. JC

Neruda’s Voice in the Wilderness

This morning, while trundling on the exercise cycle, I read Neruda’s Ode to Happiness which ends with a wakeup call for me, to get off my bum and write and share; but also the at end of the Ode to Happiness Neruda speaks his reason for the Odes, which to many seem far too simplistic. He writes:

HAPPINESS. . . With you through the world!
With my song!
With the star’s
translucent flight,
with seafoam’s transport.

I am going to keep my
promise to everyone
because I owe everyone
my bliss.

Let no one be surprised
because I want to share with all people
the Earth’s treasures
I learned fighting,
my earthly duty:
And I fulfill my destiny
with my song.

WITH THESE WORDS OF NERUDA, easily we understand his Odes to Common Things, onions, salt, garlic, the treasures of the earth. Amen.
 

 

Millionaire’s Spring Delight

    Millionaire’s Spring Delight

 

Yesterday, had I been a millionaire
able to hire a gardener or two, I ‑‑
still would have knelt in the earth
and brushed back the crunchy leaves, to see,
touch, oh! green shoots of new garlic,
tulips, peonies, dandelions. . .

Yes, pruned scratchy rose bushes
sucked blood from my thorn‑stabbed thumb;
cut back the lower aspen branches,
plucked up the dry and dead tomato and
pepper plants, snapped off hollyhock stalks.

Yes, yes, even spaded the earth and
drilled my finger into the rich soil
and planted white onion bulbs. Now,
the earth under my fingernails ‑‑
curved sliver of the rich new moon.

James Ciletti © April 2019
Recently published in
the Poet Laureate project’s journal,
Poetry While You Wait.