“Song”
by Seamus Heaney

A rowan like a lipsticked girl.
Between the by-road and the main road
Alder trees at a wet and dripping distance
Stand off among the rushes.

There are the mud-flowers of dialect
And the immortelles of perfect pitch
And that moment when the bird sings very close
To the music of what happens.

Please be sure to visit Jama Rattigan at Jama’s Alphabet Soup for the Poetry Friday Roundup. This week’s hostess with the mostest has some warm cider and apple cider doughnuts waiting for you!

Today is my birthday, and it’s a BIG one. There are many ways this birthday will not be normal, so I am excited to be celebrating the publication of HOP TO IT: Poems to Get You Moving instead. Hop to It is the latest anthology from the dynamic duo of Janet Wong and Sylvia Vardell.

I am thrilled and honored to have my poem, “Mental Floss,” included with the work of so many stellar poets. Thank you, Janet & Sylvia, for your tireless efforts to bring poetry into the lives of so many!

I also love that fellow October birthday girl and poet extraordinaire Marilyn Singer’s Feel the Beat is the suggested companion piece to my poem.

Please be sure to visit Janice Scully at Salt City Verse for the Poetry Friday Roundup.

The Sunday Night Swaggers are back with another monthly challenge. This month, Margaret Simon challenged us to write a duplex, a form created by Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Jericho Brown.

Challenge is the keyword here. I really struggled with this poem. I struggled to come up with a topic, then struggled to keep the poem from becoming too dark. I also didn’t exactly follow the rules, but I know I wrote with the spirit of the rules in mind. That has to count for something, right?

The facts are hard to dismiss;
We’re at the edge of a vast abyss.

At the edge of this abyss, can we ignore
Tons of plastic littering our shores?

Plastic-lined shores still sparkle and shine
But they are a beacon of nature’s decline

Nature’s decline is our fault alone.
Is it too late for us to atone?

Before it’s too late to atone for our greed
Let’s join together, plant the seeds

Plant seeds for the future, seeds of hope
We must stop our slide down this slippery slope

Stopping this slide is a goal we can’t miss
These are facts that we cannot dismiss.

© Draft, Catherine Flynn, 2020

Please be sure to read the duplexes my fellow Swaggers wrote at their blogs:

Molly Hogan at Nix the Comfort Zone
Linda Mitchell at A Word Edgewise
Heidi Mordhorst at My Juicy Little Universe
Margaret Simon at Reflections on the Teche

Also, don’t forget to visit Tabatha Yeatts at The Opposite of Indifference for the Poetry Friday Roundup.