Tag Archives: NaPoWriMo Challenge 2017

April 27, 2017 Poem in Your Pocket Day & Poem: “Portable”

Posted on by

Portable
for Sandy Petrek

A taste for home
pierces the tongue
early, is easy
to carry
across oceans,
or a whole lifetime.

You’ve been
teaching me
the anchoring tang
of the fresh-caught
raspberry, still dewy,
sun-and-wind
ripened, just outside
your door;

how to reach
through a forest
of obstacles—
tough green canes,
thorns, tears—
to lift a brief
sweetness to the lips,
and to let it linger.

Leslie Schultz

All over the country, today is POEM IN YOUR POCKET DAY.

(A few years ago, my friend, Sandy Petrek and I spearheaded an effort to bring this celebration to Northfield. Look for the red boxes downtown and elsewhere, or tuck a favorite poem fro home into your pocket–read it to someone else or just to yourself, and consider passing it along before the day is done.)    LESLIE

Check out other participants at the NaPoWriMo Challenge 2017 home site!

April 28, 2017 Poem “Death”

Posted on by

Death

I hate you and the horse you rode in on.
I hate your black hat, your black boots, your cloak
darker than oblivion. Carrion
memories attend you, and I hate them—oak-

galled ink scribblings in the margins of your
book. I hate the pain you cut with a steel
quill across the faces I love, how you roar
in bone-silence, deeper and more surreal

than the bedrock ticking of clocks or time
itself. I hate how you invade this form
of love, this sonnet, twisting its pretzeled rhyme
to your own echoless ends: unsound, infirm.

I shall stare you down. I shall take the reins.
Pale horse, your rider walks away in chains.

Leslie Schultz

The photograph of the white swirl on the water was taken at the glacial pothole park at Taylor’s Falls on the St. Croix River, a bit north of here. The other photographs were taken in Savannah, Georgia.

LESLIE

Check out other participants at the NaPoWriMo Challenge 2017 home site!