Below are the next six poems from our recent Twitter poetry party.
The prompts were all taken from The Voice of Robert Desnos: Selected Poems.
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.
Renoir’s Parasol
Twirling her parasol,
she waited,
miming the manners
of the prettiest girl
in a Renoir painting.
Rub toes
in the sand
twirling, lost
Does Renoir
rub the sand
on his toes?
Does Neptune
twirl a parasol
in the face
of Pluto?
Love, it’s called. Look:
see it all around you;
deny it not.
I don’t deny it;
I love twirling;
I love you.
A Lack of Communication
Love called,
and nobody recorded
the message.
The message was itself
spun once
or twice, made lies.
Love sent an email and
used a new font
for every letter.
Find the font
missing its heart.
Those Wily Giraffes
Pluto’s love is a cave full
of bats and giraffes,
their necks bent low
below stalactites.
Caves I would spelunk,
tides I would ride,
glasses empty,
planets spin
for the love of you.
Tug tides let loose the hold
and look again in my glass.
In my looking glass
I never before saw the giraffe,
Striped and spotted, hiding a giraffe,
that glass, its long neck
so long the stem
so delicate,
a glass striped and spotted,
hiding a giraffe.
Can you hide a giraffe?
Can you hide a love
as delicate
and long as mine?
Tunes, moons, runes
Tunes about moons
and moons spinning to tunes
I find on the tombstone
faint runes
a rune traced against night
a tune braced against might
a rune lost in darkness,
in silence.
Can one tune a rune
that speaks of the ruins
of lives and their revival?
The Frog Princess
A vial waiting to burst with life,
The frog in a dress with a train,
how long she waits
for her sweet prince.
The train in a corset
with a vial of vodka,
once contained
in the ruins of a life.
I wouldn’t wait;
where’s the next/train?
He so green with envy,
croaking, croaking, croaking.
He sat among the ruins,
seeking love, finding envy
spinning stories of love
that were not of she
who denied him.
Green with Venus, red
with Mars, white with moon
and black with denial:
once courtin’,
now marryin’.
Is denial not a kind of ruin,
emptied of life?
An Ivy Train
An ivy train stuck
in the muck of train tracks:
Marry me, I said,
beneath the planets,
marry me on the tracks;
put me on ivy,
take me back.
How the green
contrasts the white,
the pure with the slime,
the colors of love
playing out in a swirl of veils.
The train tracks a vine,
embedded, entangled.
Slime tracks
slime miles,
embedded with memories
that slide away.
Veiled under the shadow
of death: a tangled bed,
trained, married,
the vine a track upon a wall,
veiled in green,
veiled in shadow.
- Czeslaw Milosz, 1946-1953: “Poet in the New World” - May 13, 2025
- Poets and Poems: Alfred Nicol and “After the Carnival” - May 8, 2025
- Poets and Poems: Kelly Belmonte and “The Mother of All Words” - May 6, 2025
L.L. Barkat says
I like…
“Marry me, I said,
beneath the planets,
marry me on the tracks;
put me on ivy,
take me back.”
🙂