Like everything else this week, my Poetry Friday post is a day late. I had a minor medical procedure on Monday (everything is fine) that left me discombobulated all week. My posts have been few and far between lately, but it is the first of the month, which means…the Inkling challenge! Margaret asked us to “Explore the use of anaphora in a poem, how the repetition of a line or phrase can add depth to the theme.” She suggested Jericho Brown’s poem “Crossing”  as a mentor text. Coincidentally, I had been captivated by “Landscape with Things,” by Alexandria Hall, after hearing it on The Slowdown recently and was already playing with Hall’s repetition of the phrase “and still…”

Still

smudges of clouds streak
across the brightening sky
as pricks of light
from distant stars fade away.

And still a fox creeps
along the frayed edges
of the field, hunting for voles.

Still juice is poured,
coffee brewed, eggs scrambled.
Children wait at the driveway’s edge
to be transported to their futures.

And still the spider spins
her web above the rhododendron,
invisible to unsuspecting gnats and flies.

Still mist rises from the pond
as trucks rumble past,
their drivers focused on
the end of the journey.

No one notices 
the heron, silent and still,
until she lifts her great
blue wings and flies away.

Draft, © Catherine Flynn, 2023

Please be sure to visit my fellow Inklings to read their responses to Margaret’s challenge:

Heidi @ My Juicy Little Universe
Linda @ A Word Edgewise
Margaret @ Reflections on the Teche
Mary Lee @ A(nother) Year of Reading
Molly @ Nix the Comfort Zone

Then head over to Tanita’s blog, {fiction, instead of lies}, for the Poetry Friday Roundup.

It’s time for the monthly Inkling challenge. This month, Linda challenged the Inklings to “Honor someone’s April Poetry project in some way with a poem in the spirit of their project, a response poem or any way that suits you.” 

I knew immediately that I wanted to base my response on Tricia Stohr-Hunt’s (aka Miss Rumphius) project of “sharing original poems written in a variety of Japanese poetic forms (haiku, tanka, dodoitsu, etc.) to primary sources. I’m using photos, letters, newspaper articles, and more to inspire my writing.” Tricia shared many treasures from her family archives and her poems always captured funny or poignant insights into her source materials.

Like Tricia’s family, my family (specifically my maternal grandmother) saved everything and I have many photos and letters. I also have my grandmother’s diary from 1936, which is the only one we know of. Mostly, she recorded the weather, her daily household chores, and what she baked. There are also a few headlines from the wider world: The last line for Monday, January 20th reads “King George V of England died. Edward VIII becomes king.” She stopped writing on Saturday, August 22th with this short entry: “Rained on Sat. Went to town in A.M. Did shopping. Bought a pot roast. Not much new. They will finish the forty acre lot in one more day.” (I’m sure this refers to haying on my great-grandfather’s farm.)

I suspect she stopped writing because of this entry a few days earlier: “Feel certain that we will have a baby by spring.”

That baby turned out to be my mother and her twin sister.

Here they are, about 3 or 4, ready to attend a cousin’s wedding.

There are troves of poems waiting in that diary, but how could I resist writing about this photo? I chose a most forgiving form, the Gogyohka. This is a five line verse without a specific syllable count. As Tricia explained in her post, it was “invented in the 1960s, the idea was to ‘take the traditional form of Tanka poetry (which is written in five lines) and liberate its structure, creating a freer form of verse.’ You can learn more about this form at Writer’s Digest Gogyohka: Poetic Form.”

Please be sure to visit my fellow Inklings to see which NPM project they honored:

Mary Lee Hahn @ A(nother) Year of Reading
Molly Hogan @ Nix the Comfort Zone
Linda Mitchell @ A Word Edgewise
Heidi Mordhorst @ My Juicy Little Universe
Margaret Simon @ Reflections on the Teche

Then head over to Jama’s Alphabet Soup, where Jama is serving up the Roundup.