Day twenty-nine. Acceptence has set in. Only today and tomorrow left …

Today I am trying an experiment – and I wish I had tried it earlier in the month – since it is National Poetry Month. I didn’t – but in my defense it has been a very cold & wet April here in Oregon … and I loathe cold.  I live in Salem, capitol of Oregon and home to the Capitol Mall i.e. all the headquarter buildings to The State’s departments. It’s a lovely area –  lots of marble buildings – and in the north parking lot (Spring to Fall) the Salem Saturday Market pitches its tents.

Last night, after I got home, instead of writing my blog, I felt compiled to grab the thick stack of poem copies & roll them up. I now have a bag full of 60 scrolls. I then quickly whipped up a sign(s) for today “Poems for $1”. These are exra copies – or older copies. I typically keep two hard-copies of each of my poems; one for the poetry chronological archive binders and another for my soft-sided open mic folders (each reflects a 3 month period of a year – Or a Poetry Challenge like this month’s.) My “extras have resulted in a four inch stack – and being an envioronmentalist – I don’t just throw them out. Typically this stack is what I stock my poetry box with during the year. Well now … I have a “grab bag” of sorts.

The Saturday Market opens in 20 minutes; let’s see if I can get people paying directly for poems. Wish me luck!

On to prompts:

For my personal Poem A Day Challenge , today’s PAD is … in a helicopter.

Robert Lee Brewer’s AprPAD challenge today is to write a metric poem..

NaPoWriMo‘s featured participant for the day is orangepeel. Their featured poet is another poet/publisher, Sarah Gorham, the editor-in-chief of Sarabande Books.

Today, NaPoWriMo challenges you “to take one of your favorite poems and find a very specific, concrete noun in it. For example, if your favorite poem is this verse of Emily Dickinson’s, you might choose the word “stones” or “spectre.” After you’ve chosen your word, put the original poem away and spend five minutes free-writing associations – other nouns, adjectives, etc. Then use your original word and the results of your free-writing as the building blocks for a new poem.”

Poets&Writers 30 Day Challenge asks you to pause today and allow yourself at least fifteen uninterrupted minutes to write freely, using the first word or phhas not update rase that comes to mind to guide the entire exercise. If you come to a stopping point in the writing before time is up, revisit the initial word or words as you would a refrain.

And last & late but finally posted, The Poetry School’s NaPoWriMo Group prompts creating a Self-Cento for Day 29. A centro is a found poem, made up of lines taken from other poets’ poems; this self-centro focuses on taken lines from your own past poems And they suggent having it be 28 lines long – such as if you took a line from the 28 poems you have  already written this month.

Today’s poem:  I used to be an in-home care-giver. Two of my patients were a married Vietnamese couple, Yen & Kay – I adored them! Thursday’s I would drive them to Portland for Kay’s doctor appointment, and afterwards we would have lunch at the near-by Pho Van restaurant. This was written on our 6th visit there. They have now passed away – in their home-land , I heard. But a friend treated me to luch there last fall and, walking through those aged doors, it was like stepping back in time.

Pho Van

Heavy doors of aged wood
screened the diners from view.
Lamps hung in conical baskets –
clean lines gracefully curving.
The interior walls of walnut grids –
spartan yet purely unpractical –
hung with gleaming musical instruments,
figurines worked in Mother of Pearl.
Inset were panels of lemon grass silhouetted
against warm cream light.
Tall indoor palms reached upward –
leaves gently moving from the
ceiling fans. Their large, dark
woven blades slowly rotate in tandem,
the light ceiling itself was curved upwards
& ventured tall towards the skylights

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