Wednesday, April 01, 2015

AND...IT'S APRIL AGAIN, AND YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS!

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HAPPY NATIONAL POETRY MONTH!

Okay, I know I've been shirking my blogarial duties of late. I have not felt like blogging so I have not blogged. It's my blog and I can do that. I wasn't going to do (or attempt to do, more accurately; 30 days being a long time and all) a poem a day for April this year, but then I saw some posts about it on Facebook and my fingers started itching, just a little bit, so here goes, thanks to prompts from the good people at NaPoWriMo 2015.

But before we get started with today's poem, in poetry news today the League of Canadian Poets announced the short lists for the awards they manage and I was so happy to see Joanne Arnott's Halfling Spring on the list for the Pat Lowther Award. I blogged about Halfling Spring here last November.

The prompt:

Today's poem promt comes via a poem by Bernadette Mayer. "Mayer’s lamentation for the other lives we could have led is something we probably have all felt. Today, why not try writing your own poem that begins “I guess it’s too late to live on a farm”? Or if you already live on a farm, why not “I guess it’s too late to live in the city”? Or, if you’ve lived on both farms and in cities, perhaps it’s too late to live on a boat or in the mountains or on the moon or in an underground missile silo?"

Well, elsewhere on the site it says you can do pretty much whatever you want when it comes to this poem-a-day thing, so I did this:



Even If I Wanted To


I guess it’s too late to convert to Islam.
My government says anyone who does is most likely a terrorist.
I guess Cat Stevens got it all wrong when he did.

I guess I shouldn’t have let the girl in the hijab the colour of sunset
who lived in the same house in a room down the hall drive me to the airport. 
She might have slipped something into my suitcase.

What? A dried flower caught between the pages of a note
saying she would miss me?
A copy of a poem of hers that I admired?

I guess I shouldn’t have noticed how her farewell hug
smelled of jasmine which was also her name,
how her cheek tasted of cinnamon.

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