Poetry in the city

A new crop of poetry is on the Seattle buses. It's enough to make me store my bike and ride more. I want to see new poems!

I especially liked the story about The Learning Tree preschoolers. Karen Campbell, their teacher who sent in their poem, used to coach my daughter's soccer team.

Here is the poem that I sent in, a poem that I wrote as a follow-up to This Hard April.

The Half Awake


Late blossoms fly in a gust, a swirl
of days we dreamed,

our snow without winter.
One year. Still a shock

when half the bed is bare.
Again the wind blows cherry blooms

into the street, ornamental branches left
with only leaves that grow large

and green without mercy.

And now, it's time to ride. After all, we have places to go and poems to read!

Bus poem reminder

Have you submitted your bus poem yet? The contest is open to residents of King, Kitsap, Pierce, and Snohomish counties in Washington State. It's an online submission form, and I now I've sent mine in.

Just for fun, here are the two fifty-words-or-less poems that I didn't send:

Quiet

She lies very still, tries to connect
one world to the next, hold her dreams
as though she carried a full bowl.

She sits up.
The vessel becomes a sieve.

Fatigue is the thread that fills both her worlds.
Some day, she will remember.
Some night, she will sleep.



When the Window Stays Dark

What lark wakes me?
Or is it a common robin
singing into the dark?
The moon floats nearly full,
floods its light onto frost—
seasons spring with winter.
My dreams spill
onto the carpet,
mingle with this poem
that keeps me from sleep.

When you have only fifty words, half the fun is in finding the right title. As far as I know, there is no official limit on length (although it still has to fit on a bus placard).

Bus poems & a question

Originally, my plan was to write a new bus poem--start a new bus poem--on each day of my vacation. I was about halfway through the week when I realized that, in working on my long project, I had forgotten about my earlier plans. So I decided to write a bus poem a day for the first half of April (except for the first of April).

So here is the reminder: If you live in King, Kitsap, Pierce, or Snohomish county in Washington State, you can submit a poem for possible publication on the bus. The poem must be 50 words or less, you can submit only one poem, and the deadline is April 30. For more information, go to www.4culture.org.

On a different note, does anyone out there know about the publishing status of poems that are published on blogs?

So far, I've only been posting poems that were previously published or that will probably not be published anywhere else (example: "The Apologies of J. Alfred P."). But a friend was asking whether I had posted some garden poems, and I thought this was as good a time as any to find out about the rules.

Rules on a blog? What next?