Poetry Experiments

Before the anomaly of this warmest winter on record passes into "that was so yesterday," I am sharing an experiment I did in our Experiments in Poetry class.

In the first, I attempt a traditional form called envelope verse, four stanzas of four lines, each having four metrical feet, end-rhyming abba.

Some weeks later, I shaped the same material into organic free verse, a form in which I customarily write.

Good for the brain, and for shaking out some new possibilities in your work.

Said brother with tomato from 2011 garden.

                                                February , 2012

My brother, Rafe, is planting lettuce,

the earliest, he says, planting in his

(subtract seven from fifty-eight) years is

fifty years of gardening, a half –century, let us

Say, Rafe is planting our family’s iconic

Lettuce: black-seeded simpson, the old man’s

favorite, Our Father whose winter bibles ran

to Burpee’s, Stark Brothers and Herter’s, ironic--

planting on February 5, what used to be winter --

our family’s iconic variety, a green, the palest of palest

shade of all shall be well again, in the darkest, frailest

of seasons, when even ancient glaciers splinter.

Yes, Rafe ,heir to our father’s gardening passion

is planting lettuce on super bowl sunday, holy day

I do not observe, which arguably canonizes the way

we got to this place where winning trumps compassion.

February 5, 2012

                                    (draft 5 of organic free verse version)  Mary Pierce Brosmer

My brother, Rafe, is planting lettuce

the earliest, he says, in his half-century,

counted from trailing our father

in boyhood, gardening.

           

My brother, Rafe, is planting

Black-Seeded Simpson

our family’s iconic variety

the old man’s favorite,

Our Father whose winter bibles ran

to Burpee, Stark Brothers and Herter.

My brothers, Rafe and Keith,

and I remember the salads

Our Mother made of this lettuce

fragile leaves of palest green

sprinkle of just-pulled onion

splash of oil, douse of vinegar

flavors of all shall be well again

in a Crooksville Pottery bowl.

My brother, Rafe, is planting lettuce on

Super Bowl Sunday, holy day I do not celebrate,

try not to resent others celebrating,

despite all the ways it arguably represents

(offensive consumption-competition-distraction)

why Rafe can safely plant lettuce

in North Central Ohio in the middle of winter.

How can global warming not spring

to my fear-doused brain followed by the splash

of how fruitless it is to argue about any of it

(the arguing is itself a distraction),

sprinkle of how much I am warming finally

to the possibility of celebrating every flavor

of my own melting away life on the planet.

I enter the garden of my brother’s joy.

Rafe, planting lettuce on February 5,

2012, year some have argued, of the Apocalypse.