Poetry: The Music of Words

At Appel Farm in August, an intrepid group of poets came together to put the Convention's music theme into lilting words. One of our exercises, Ten Lines in Ten Minutes, yielded the startling and accomplished poems below. If you sense a mysterious kinship among them, it is because they all make unique use of the following ten words: grass, row, gulp, seesaw, surf, reach, playback, hum, bend, and clay.

Happy Unbirthday Dianea
by Dianea Kohl

A big gulp, to make it all about me.
To bend a space big as a sycamore tree.
So wide am I, the ocean has no surf,
all these decades, told I have no turf.
My grass never to be walked on,
my heart, known like eyes of a fawn.
Playback my life, let me see-SAW -
Hmmm. Happy Birthday without a flaw
because I am meant-to-Be here -- to reach
"I love you more," my birthday speech.


The Flash
by Judy Lucrezia

I hear the hum of the surf
As I see it gulp against the grass.

Row by row of beachroses
     reach out of their cluster
And bend toward the sun.

The birds seesaw through the air,
While children mold sand clay
     in odd shapes.

In a flash, my mind is in playback
     to a happier time.


Seesaw
by Harriet Geller

Bite the open air, rows of ancient
flyers humming,
built by their genes on mechanical
principles we bend around
the grass to comprehend.

Our curious species reaches
into the clay, gulps
mouthfuls of surf,
and trips into dreams that
play back our story.


Summer Idyll
by Bob Holmes

When I got to the beach
I walked through the marsh grass
And began to hum a tune which I had
     been playing on my boom-box.
There was no surf in this quiet row of
     see-saw waves,
And I wanted to reach the bend in the
     shoreline
Where some lovely molding clay
Lay waiting a few inches beneath the sand.
With the sound fading from my throat,
I took a gulp of cold water
And pressed the playback button.


Ten Words, Ten Lines
by Bill Whitesell

How can I bend myself to these foreign words?
I hate this playback mode!
I want to grow from within,
Reach to the source of upwelling meanings.
Hum, hmm, ahh, hmm.
All that I can do is seesaw here
Between ten impositions
And the churning surf of my own raucous soul.
The grass is greener without the need
To gulp down this hardening external clay!


Untitled
by Rainey

Hum . . . playback.
To be a little girl,
lying in tall grass.
Reach, reach, reach,
feel the earth's clay.

Gulp . . . a salty wave.
A row of salty waves.
A surf, a seesaw—high, low, up, & down
in the salty waves.
I bend, I float, among the salty waves.
Gulp . . . yum.

This article appeared in the Fall 2003 IPA Newsletter.