“Most people prefer angels to salamanders as symbols of the inspirational, although one is surely as wondrous as the other.”
Margaret Atwood
http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/bookend/bookend.html
I’m sure there’s a poem in here somewhere, waiting to get out…..
“….with a lyric poem, you look, and meditate, and put the rock back. With fiction you poke things with a stick to see what will happen.”
Margaret Atwood
http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/bookend/bookend.html
…although I would argue that good Speculative Poetry does poke about with a stick……
Linguistic music, patternings, rhymes
Representations of being
A beautiful sunset
Snapshots of souls, of lives
Illumination, aliveness
Waves crashing on a beach
Poems about real life
Poems made out of nothing
Moonlight over mountains
The despair and anger of these days
All belong to poetry
Now, as ever
Copyright © 2018 Kim Whysall-Hammond
Inspired by an interview with the poet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Cole“>Henri Cole and written in response to those who think poems about nature and family are irrelevant and unpublishable.
Words cannot encompass this nebulaic magnificence
Glowing dust hides star birth from prying eyes
Stars that dwarf our own mother sun lurk in clouds lit by particle winds
Radiation surges and particle winds sculpt huge gas pillars
Gas that has fed billowing pregnant clouds and grown embryo stars
Glows in colours beyond our eyes capacity to see
This beauty has travelled for almost seven millennia to achieve our orbit
Photons radiating away from the stellar birthing place
Those remaining after absorption and reflection losses are here
Now washing our instruments with glory
Now humbling our eyes with truth
Copyright © 2016 Kim Whysall-Hammond
Inspired by February 5th Picture of the Day: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap160205.html
I send you my poetry
As the Sperm Whale sends her song out into the wide ocean
To listens for echoes, to hope for response
Her staccato clicks can be hunting for sustenance
But they also encode messages and love songs
Poems may sustain you or tell you a truth
Copyright © 2016 Kim Whysall-Hammond
We are the body electric
Our cells sense differences
In the electricities around us
We are multitudes
blood containing cells
from parents and children
And yes, children, we are stardust
billions of stars died three times over
to make our atoms
Poetry and wonder
is our very
existence
Copyright © 2018 Kim Whysall-Hammond
The art of living appears to be in accepting the inevitable
Negotiating a peace with oneself
Making a treaty with the world
And then becoming free to really live
Copyright © 2016 Kim Whysall-Hammond
First blogged in 2016.
“The art of living lies less in eliminating our troubles than in growing with them.”
― Bernard M. Baruch
From http://dailyinspiration.me/
Two lights gleam equally across the snow
The traveller hesitates which way to go . . .
One is a cottage lamp; the other ray
A world four hundred million miles away.
by Theodore Stephanides, who should be familiar to all who love Gerald Durrell‘s “My Family and other Animals”. Theodore was a polymath—-both Doctor and aquatic biologist, and he wrote wonderful poetry.
Maybe we are not players on a stage
But in an orchestra
Each with a part to play
Integral to the whole
They tell us to aim high
Lead role, boss, the one and only
First violin
But so many of us thrive without the spotlight
The pedestal
What is a orchestra without a third row?
Empty.
Copyright © 2018 Kim Whysall-Hammond
Considering the expanding universe and ultimate cooling, I pause
remembering photos of star birth amid nebulosity,
nuclear furnaces blossoming.
Telescopes in orbit or secluded in foreign deserts
produce pictures in lights we cannot see
show immensities in glorious un-colours.
In the back garden, I look up, past scudding clouds,
watch coloured pinpricks arrayed over black sky
with occasional satellites twinkling by beneath.
Feeling the breeze, green with trees, redolent with life
thinking of all those things we cannot see
here and all the way up there.
Copyright © 2018 Kim Whysall-Hammond
