It’s probably been a year since I read a book called Fierce on the Page by Sage Cohen. Sage is a blogger who writes about writing. The book is a collection of posts that tie together her thoughts on how to be a better writer and budget time for people who think they are too busy to write. It is an excellent book, but that is not what I’m writing about today. Her primary passion is poetry. I subscribed to her blog. One of her posts mentioned an exercise for poets that started with 5 unrelated words to be made into a poem. Several years ago, I thought it would be fun to be a poet, so I purchased a book on writing poetry and by about the third page, my head started to hurt. That was enough of that. Then along comes the challenge of 5 words. I tried it and used three of the words and then the big block hit. I left it in my journal and forgot about it for months. Then the pandemic hit and in a moment of boredom, I started reading some of my old journal entries and came across it. The poem finished itself. Something about the aurora cast by the pandemic. I thought: “well that was easy”. I went online (what else?) and found a site that had some more. I now have three done. I know nothing of the rules of writing poetry. They don’t have titles. That seems harder than writing the content. I have just used the five words for a title. Here they are so far:
Bruise horse milk reason bride
Truth is the bride of reason
What strange bedfellows they make
They ride the horse that is out of season
Leaving a bruise on that which is fake
The milk of kindness is spun
Vein verse bee rhythm thirst
This was to be a simple verse
The air has turned very terse
The rhythm of mother earth
Echoes humanity’s thirst
A vein of pollution streaks the sky
The symbolic bee begins to die
Dandelion rough rain antidote skill
The intrusion of a single dandelion in the spring
Nurtured by the welcomed chaos of rain
The antidote to an overly ordered mind it does bring
It calms the rough structure of a world that doesn’t forgive
With the skill of a masseuse, to help me live
Pete's Wisdom 