Month: April 2015

  • Worm’s-Eye View

    WORMS EYE VIEW

    Worm’s-Eye View

    “Things are changing too fast,”
    says the grandmother, 73.

    “She doesn’t have to use the new things,”
    says the daughter, 15, digital native,
    born in the third month of a new millennium.

    The Thinkers say we’ve progressed
    as much in last 15 years
    as we did in the previous one hundred.

    The great-grandmother, 98, sends an email.

    The Thinkers say that by 2025, they’ll be out of a job.

    The brains they are building out of zeros and ones
    will be as good, and then better than theirs.

    What will be the literature of the Next Intelligence?

    Will they be poets, preferring the obsessive forms?

    Will they possess a creativity so advanced
    it’s unrecognizable?

    Art, as pleasing to us, as ours is to an earthworm.

     

    (National Poetry Month Challenge, Day 5. Thanks to Tim Urban for getting me thinking about artificial intelligence.)

  • Eleven Things I Did Not Write a Poem About

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    Eleven things I did not write a poem about

    1. The leak in my bathroom
    2. The new squeak from my car
    3. Sunshine or ukuleles
    4. The angst of adolescence
    5. Airplanes
    6. My mountains of laundry
    7. Moonrise over the mountain
    8. Peeps
    9. Red plastic cups in a pyramid on my window bench
    10. Alarm clocks
    11. You.

     

    (Days 3 and 4 of the National Poetry Month Challenge)

  • Deep Thoughts from the Back Seat (A Haiku)

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    “I think,” the boy said
    “Many decisions for kids
    start with candy.”(Day Two of the National Poetry Month challenge.)

  • Broken Pastry

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    Broken Pastry

    My grandmother’s pie crusts were perfect.
    Fragile containers holding the sweet fruits
    of her small hands’ hard work.

    My own crusts were hard and tough
    as I experimented and strayed
    from tradition. Until someone taught me
    a method I could master.

    Cold fat.
    Hot water.
    Emulsify.

    Science and uncertainty.
    Instinct of spice and smell
    mixed with precision
    of volume and temperature.

    Preheat.
    Wait.
    The proof is in the breaking.

     

    (Poem #1 in the National Poetry Month Challenge. I was challenged by Don Rearden. Last year I got to about day 12. We’ll see what happens this time!)