Welcome to Morning Open Thread, a daily post with a MOTley crew of hosts who choose the topic for the day's posting. We support our community, invite and share ideas, and encourage thoughtful, respectful dialogue in an open forum.
This diarist, who is on Pacific Coast Time, may sometimes show up later than when the post is published. That is a feature, not a bug. Other than that, site rulz rule.
Shakespeare sneaks some of his best lines into the long-winded speeches of Polonius. This speech is a classic use of contradiction to make something humorous, but part of what makes it funny is that we all know someone like Polonius – that guy at your work whose favorite phrase is “so to make a long story short,” always delivered well into his monologue, and oh-so-long before its actual end.
But surfing the Internet last Saturday night, wondering what this post was going to be about, I was playing with an idea that didn’t pan out, but which did put me on a twisting and turning road to a completely different place – here:
“This site publishes one-sentence poems every other day. Please send us your one-sentence poems. All poems are copyrighted by their respective authors. Once published here, rights revert back to the authors. If they appear elsewhere, we ask for acknowledgment of first publication by One Sentence Poems. Ask your doctor about One Sentence Poems. If any one of these poems lasts more than 4 hours, go to your local emergency room.”
Here are a few recent posts at One Sentence Poems which I found particularly pleasing:
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Florence Reiss Kraut —
X-Country Skiing
After night snowfall,
breath billows smoke in the still air
and skis unzip the snow.
Florence Reiss Kraut is a social worker and writer living in Rye, New York, who has published stories in print and on line, and is currently completing a novel in linked stories—her first.
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Rodd Whelpley —
New Year’s Resolution
Physically
and egotistically
there needs to be
much less of me.
Rodd Whelpley is the secret poet in residence at the Illinois Municipal Electric Agency, where he also runs an electric efficiency program for 33 cities in the state.
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Tricia Sankey —
When I found you, you were a book, knocked clean off a nightstand –
spine splayed out, words that gasped,
and I read all your pages on the floor, by candlelight.
Tricia Sankey is a writer and collector of short fiction and poems, you may view her favorites on www.milspouseprose.com.
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Grant Quackenbush —
What He Said When I Put Him to Bed
Some nights, lying on my back
and staring up at this popcorned ceiling
in the dark, I’ll think about the date
I didn’t ask her out on, and how she has a kid now
who’s fifty–five and takes care of her.
Grant Quackenbush is a skateboarder from San Diego and is currently a first–year MFA student in poetry at the University of California, Irvine.
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Keith Nunes —
The sound she makes when having sex is like the last of a species caught in a blizzard.
Keith Nunes (Lake Rotoma, New Zealand) was a newspaper sub-editor for more than 20 years but now he writes to stay grounded in unsanitised bulgur wheat.
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Jessica Isaacs —
silence
He talks constantly,
rambling on aimlessly
just to fill the silence,
.
because the silence
says more
than he’s ready
.
to hear.
Jessica Isaacs, the founder and co-editor of Dragon Poet Review, an online literary journal (dragonpoetreview.com), received the 2015 Oklahoma Book Award for Poetry for her first full-length book of poems, Deep August (Village Books Press, 2014).
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C. G. Vowles —
Parados
When the last pigeon dies
and tilts itself from life,
let us have blackbirds to darken
the frosted rooftops.
C. G. Vowles teaches English in a boarding school in North Yorkshire, dividing his free time between writing poetry and writing essays on obscure pop-cultural phenomena.
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These one sentence poems immediately reminded me of Adrian Henri’s Satiric Poem:
Song For A Beautiful Girl Petrolpump Attendant On The Motorway
I wanted your soft verges
But you gave me the hard shoulder.
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And Japanese Haiku, like Bashō:
Above the ruins
of a shrine, a chestnut tree
still lifts its candles.
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Or my favorite line from Albert Camus:
In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.
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Serendipity
Brief poetry unfurls for the brief days of Winter Solstice.
