January 27, 2025: "Fate," Poetic Genes, "Winter Weather Exhibit"

A friend recently asked me where I got my poetic genes.  I can't answer that question.  My dad was a plumber, spending his entire life fixing line breaks in sewers instead of stanzas.  My mom was a reader.  Perhaps I inherited my love of words from her.

Sharon Olds tries not to become her father . . . 

Fate

by: Sharon Olds

Finally I just gave up and became my father,
his greased, defeated face shining toward
anyone I looked at, his mud-brown eyes
in my face, glistening like wet ground that
things you love have fallen onto
and been lost for good. I stopped trying
not to have his bad breath,
his slumped posture of failure, his sad
sex dangling on his thigh, his stomach
swollen and empty. I gave in
to my true self, I faced the world
through his sour mash, his stained acrid
vision, I floated out on his tears.
I saw the whole world shining
with the ecstasy of his grief, and I
myself, he, I, shined,
my oiled porous cheeks glaucous
as tulips, the rich smear of the petal,
the bulb hidden in the dark soil,
stuck, impacted, sure of its rightful place.

Olds eventually accepts the father parts of herself--his defeated face, mud-brown eyes, ecstasy of grief.  It's sort of impossible to escape your genetics.  You are who you are, no matter how much you want to run away from home.

I am my father's son, with his penchant for quick anger and hard work.  I'm also my mother's son, with her capacity for cutting through the bullshit.  So from where did my poetic talent come?  Maybe I'm the reincarnation of Robert Frost or Walt Whitman.  Maybe my mother read Shel Silverstein to me in utero.  Or perhaps I'm just a genetic anomaly--one of those accidents of nature that can't be explained.  I'm a duckbilled platypus.  

Whatever its origin, my love of words has been with me since I was very young.  I've always wanted to be a published author.  My dad made me a plumber's apprentice.  My mother tried to convince me to go into computer programming.  I'm not angry with them.  They were both trying to look out for me.  However, the call of the poet was just to strong for me to ignore.

Saint Marty issues a poetic weather warning tonight, based on the following prompt from The Daily Poet:

Find an interesting newspaper article and circle all of the words that interest you.  Write a poem about a topic that has nothing to do with the article.  See if you can use these words in new ways.  If the article was about the environment and you circled the words "fracking" and "global warming" think about new ways that you can use these terms, such as "fracking one's heart" or "having global warming of the brain."  See where your poem leads you.

Winter Weather Exhibit

by: Martin Achatz

The National Weather Service has issued

a Winter Weather Exhibit for the area,

dominated by wildfires of snow, handfuls

of glacial artistry.  Think of Wyeth's Helga,

her devastating cheeks, wake of braids, gazing

into a blank celebration:  white racked up

on white racked up on white.  Or Monet painting

a frozen pond scummed with dead water

lilies, perhaps a brood of snow geese collected

on the shore, military beaks pointed

heavenward, waiting for a break

in the clouds, a resilience of blue

to return the landscape to its original 

mixture of soft light, lapping wave.

ADDITIONAL DEATILS . . . May be

upgraded to a Winter Storm Retrospective

if Edward Hopper finds an all-night

diner that serves cherry pie.