extreme closeup!

Spring has fully sprung here in Portland. with our dogwood and cherry trees in bloom. On a neighborhood walk with the pups I noticed the tiny little daisies scattered through the lawns, so I took out the camera and turned on the “macro” setting for an extreme closeup.

Those little daisies inspired me to look for more tiny things during the rest of that walk.

Here’s an experiment in 3D: cross your eyes until the two pictures merge.

It’s amazing what you can miss if you don’t take the time to look up close.

Returning home, I finished up with a pair of final extreme closeups — the dogwood and cherry blossoms right outside my own front door.

poem: unlike things

simile: a figure of speech comparing two unlike things, often introduced by like or as.
metaphor: a figure of speech in which a word or phrase literally denoting one kind of object or idea is used in place of another to suggest a likeness or analogy between them.
– Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary

life is like a simile
i compare yours to mine
pretending they should be the same
why aren’t you more like me?

life is a metaphor
if i see the world through your eyes
if i walk a mile in your shoes
who will meet me when i arrive?

life is a deep snow-covered hillside pasture
at twilight as the first stars appear,
where dozens of laughing dogs leap and run in circles
with sparklers

April is National Poetry Month, and on the ReadWritePoem blog  a bunch of poets more dedicated than me :-) have taken on the challenge of writing a poem-a-day for the whole month — check it out!

the opposite

Most people, I think, are familiar with the saying “the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference”. But I learned today from Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac that the full quote is

The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.

said by Elie Wiesel, who survived the Buchenwald concentration camp as a teenager in World War II. American troops entered the camp on April 11, 1945.

poem: desert sky circles

desert sky circles:
sunset’s red rainbow beckons
as the moon rises

Lost in the desert, Throws-his-words and Fierce Cat heed Raven’s sign, a red rainbow surrounding the rising full moon, that leads them to water. The haiku is how I would write it; here is Throws-his-word’s song:

In the land of hard stones,
In the land of painted giants,
In the land of angry trees,
In the land of parched lips,

Raven, where is the laughing grass?
Raven, where are the sleeping trees?
Raven, where are the deer and the buffalo?
Raven, where are the singing streams?

“Wait for the sunset”, Raven whispers.
“Wait for the moonrise”, Raven whispers.
“Look me in the eye”, Raven whispers.
“See what I see and come to me.”

I linked this poem to the readwritepoem blog, where there is a weekly poetry “prompt” inviting people to submit poems on a new theme each week. This week’s theme was collaborative, to write a poem using the first line donated from another poet’s poem. I selected my line from a lovely poem by jone.

(You can read other poets’ submissions on the theme at the readwritepoem blog too. By the way, red rainbows are a real phenomenon, and the one Nancy and I saw during a neighborhood walk last weekend was the inspiration for this poem.)

As part of the prompt, I also donated the first line of one of my own poems, and I was delighted to see how other poets took it and made it their own. Check them out!

poem: face

pre-dawn dark silence,
looking at my (almost) face
in the bathroom mirror.
through the washcloth
my hands see more clearly

Is it just me, or maybe it’s because I’m so near-sighted without my glasses, but I know my own face much better by touch than sight. I’ll often get up early in the morning, especially in winter, wash and dress quietly, deliberately, without turning on any lights. It’s a very different place than the everyday world dominated by sight and sound.

I linked this poem to the readwritepoem blog, where there is a weekly poetry “prompt” inviting people to submit poems on a new theme each week. This week’s theme was to write a poem literally in your face. (You can read other poets’ submissions on the theme at the blog too.)