I know,keep moving

I had so much fun writing those two shorts from those various photo prompts.... bathed in the generous comments,dreamt of a big white cow last night....but it's over...it's now Tuesday....sober up Sue...You are only as good as your next act!  I can't wait!

  I wanted to be a poet. But writing classes,poetry magazines,open mics,academics,and other poets killed that for me. Now I just write poetry for the pure pleasure of expression. Oh it's a hoot when someone actually connects with your poem....but after all these years on earth...I know I have to connect with me, be honest,  write in my own way.
 Ordinary folk don't "get" poetry.....If it doesn't rhyme like a Hallmark card..they stare at you with pitiful eyes.  I understand that. I had to start slow on poetry. Here's how it happened.
My friend invited me to join their writing group...bring a small sample of your writing she says.
Okay...I show up with my 'piece" called, Mrs.Karas. They ask me to read first. As I'm rounding page two of my little story about a woman who thinks an old lady in the grocery store has taken in her cat.....I sense the room's energy has changed. I pause,look up. The leader says 'Continue, Dear."  I finish, they say they like it and then proceed to tell me that this is a poetry group.
This has happened to me before. I once went to a New Age shop for an Artist's Way Group and mistakenly sat in the Shaman from Siberia's group....I'll tell that story some other time.  Anyway, I was so embarrased,but I pledged to write a poem for the following week. Poem-shoem...what did I know from poem. For the next week I read every poem I could get my hands on. My first poem was a rhymer....here it is: (and no snickering)
Family Tree
Searching the graveyard
a date or a clue
maybe a tombstone
a lost name or two
mystery abounds as I
walk 'ore the plots
maybe a kin, maybe a not

What strikes me the most
is we all are the same
families have losses
and families have pain

I find a new kinfolk
an angel carved deep
I take down her info
and leave her to sleep

Now, I was happy with this poem and so was the group. But a monster had been unleashed in me..where had poetry been all my life....I found myself obsessed with poetry. Soon I outgrew this group and went on to a more advanced group. There is no heaven on earth. Where the first group was content with writing ditties....not obsessed with metaphor,similies,enjambment,line break, and such, as I was...The other group....consisted of published poets that obsessed on themselves and their credentials.....they cared only about their work,no one else's..what's the point I wondered. It's poetry...don't you get it...it's mother's milk......they had forgotten.

"It's absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts. The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken a mortal wound----that he will never get over it. That is to say,permanence in poetry as in love is perceived instantly.
It hasn't to await the test of time"..........Robert Frost

I enjoyed poetry his way.....then I discovered short story, and then flash fiction, and now 140characters...who knew?  I am filled with joy challenging myself..expressing to myself things inside of me that want words.

Life goes on its merry complications and winter is still dragging on, and I still need to lose weight, and my mother needs visiting, and my writing friends want to get together, and my other friends dont' want to be forgotten...and then there's the family...hubby.....shopping,cleaning (yes I clean my own house) bill paying, critter caring......when's a girl going to write or paint or draw....or do anything creative......
She finds a way!
.. I leave you with this:

THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
----Wendall Berry

  I have taken a mortal wound
and I will never get over it....thank you Mr. Berry.