Below are four additional poems from Tuesday’s Twitter poetry party. The prompts for the jam all came from the play Richard II by Wiliam Shakespeare.

A Leopard’s Smile

By @llbarkat and @gyoung9751; edited by @gyoung9751.

Rubies, Red like Snow

Jewels of ice,
rubies red like
sunset snow,
rubies like dawn
rising.
Can the Countess
eat her red oysters,
pearls askance?

Sapphires like a Deep Sea

She reached for sapphires
like a deep sea, an ocean
jewelled in clouds of pearls.
Sapphires I’ll take,
if that’s your offer
sweet.
The pearls were flung
upon a beach of sapphires,
rounded specks
on a field of blue.
What kind of beach
shall we wish –
sapphire
ruby
emerald
pearl
a place where no grief
jewels the sand?

I Scooped the Pearls

I scooped the pearls,
the sapphires,
with enamelled spades
of pink and yellow;
pink and yellow scoops
drip pearls
drip pastel love
on empty sands.
All is uneven –
the sands
the scoops
the leopards
rushing
from the lions.
the leopards like
black stones, skimming
across a starlit sea,
black stones
upon the leopard’s back
the night he chases
hard.

She Walked Among the Sapphires

She walked among
the sapphires and pearls,
touching her breastplate
of lapis lazuli only once.
And streams uneven be
and stones and night,
closing in, leaving light
upon the jeweled beach.
And each to each
cry ruby silent
night
Lucy in the night sky,
with stars instead
of diamonds,
six stars,
perhaps seven,
nothing is plumb,
nothing is refracted
in a line.
Time bends
with mathematical
movement, flowing
unevenly
into a star stream.

Adieu. Exeunt all

Photograph: Spots by Kaiti Miss via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.