Last week, seven of us (and a few lost souls who wandered in and promptly left, determined to stay lost) joined together for our Twitter poetry party. The prompts were all taken from The Voice of Robert Desnos: Selected Poems.

Parasols and scorpions are an odd combination or a title, but, well, you know how poetry is sometimes. It’ll get clearer as we go along. I think. Below are the first three poems and a quartet.

And more is to come.

Of Parasols and Scorpions

By @llbarkat, @doallas, @jejpoet, @mattpriour, @ERBKs, @mdgoodyear and @gyoung9751; a late entry or two by @SandraHeskaKing; a few retweets by @moondustwriter, @Laura_The_Wise, @TinaNguyen, @jesskristie, @CirclesRoundSun, @Julia_Hensley, @GPWriter, @rasmithii, @roseasho, @Sahrazad528 and @PoeticHeart34; two plaintive cries at having missed the jam by @meilbheag and @vnesdoly; and edited by @gyoung9751. (It takes a whole village to write a poem.)

Love, Falling

She falls for him.
You don’t write forests
with pens,
pistols with stars;
you don’t write love,
just fall
with words etched
in moonlight.

Night and day
the stars sing
murder in white forests
falling.
The phonographs sing
night and day
moon falling
day fallen
murdered love

In Paris, Falling

Songs not of grief
but like rain
falling in Paris.
Etch my heart
with soft rain,
phonograph spinning
Paris memories.

Sweet faces
mime the words
along the Seine.
Night will sing
and day
An old record
of love in Paris.

Eiffel lost
streets lost
faces lost
my wrinkled palms
an old record
crackling
recover memories.

Along the Seine
on the Ile de la Cite
take in the faces
smiling from the ramparts
of Notre Dame
Memories of pistols, voices;
Seine draining to sea,
Seine empty.

Spinning Seed

Begin
where I feel
my beginning
makes claim to hours,
spun together
with the woolen threads
of my end
like a seed falling to the earth
being split asunder
dying.
My woven end
is near the beginning
of hours,
voice empty,
seed unraveled to
time.

A Thunder of New Music: Quartet

1
A thunder of new music
rising, stolen
with kisses,
spread like seed.
I call thunder and music
I call kisses
and seeds split
I call
I call tornadoes and hurricanes
your furies my revenge
and do not answer.

2
Playing out in hours,
empty of your music
and with magic refrains
of the song older than time,
resurrected,
I call to me those lost in the fields,
sprouting like a funnel.

I call
I call
I call
I tornado,
trying to remember
the lost.

3
Playing out time
funnels of history,
magic lost
love lost
songs long forgotten,
I call to me
those lost in the fields.
I collect their stories.
I rewrite their ends.

4
You can have your merely angry wind.
I call volcanoes and earthquakes.
Now the game is on.
The lost fields
the music
the stories woven,
raveled
rewritten.
Tornado spins
and time, nova life,
nova love,
galaxy abandons me.