Sunday, February 15, 2009

The Portfolio Project

I've been playing along with The Portfolio Project since the beginning of the year. You can read more about the specifics here.

Since writing poetry is a process, involves a lot of revision, I don't have a lot of "product" to show for the work I've done. I've been hesitant to go back through the raw pages I've written. Right now, I am just creating a pile of pages - raw material to be sifted through later for ideas and images.

But I have written a few things that I can call poems during the project and I will share two of them below.

Please check out Jen Lee and see how other folks are playing the game.


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Matin


The purple slip of sunrise
all that is still and not still
in the predawn darkness
birds, breeze, baying of the basset hound
two houses down.

The hum of morning
in the house over my shoulder
the smell of promised rain
the cold of the porch
under my bare feet
cool air closing, wrapping
around me like a shawl.

Stepping into morning
the call and response of birdsong
low rumble of traffic half a mile away
how as the sun comes up
the buried light in everything
begins to seep out, take color
resurrect.


#5

Stepping out into early evening
it is fifteen seconds at most
of standing in the moist air
looking up at the
almost full moon
as the clouds blow past
time to take
maybe one breath
and back into
the beating heart of the house
with its dinner, its child,
a basket of socks.