Five Cinquains

I wasn’t going to join in on Poetry Friday today, then went to Linda’s roundup, found her post on Adelaide Crapsey and the cinquain form, and decided to put something up after all.

The cinquain is one of the short forms I’ve written in when composing poems in response to the daily photography prompts I’ve been following. Here are five (in honor of the cinquain’s five lines) that I’ve written in the past few months. They’ll take you back to spring and onward. (Title is the photo prompt word or phrase.)

Fresh

Policeman’s helmet (Photo © 2017 by V. Nesdoly)

just washed
smell of laundry
policeman’s helmet grows
riotously beside the stream
fresh pink

Group

McBurney Lane art piece (Photo © 2017 by V. Nesdoly)

Teamwork
Community
Get involved, Lend a hand
Support, Help out, Volunteer, Care
Give back.

A helping hand

My viewing deck on eclipse morning (Photo © 2017 by V.Nesdoly)

Eclipse—
protect my eyes:
box, tin foil, white paper
pinhole camera in my hand.
Viewed safe.

Fencing

Bug on a fence (Photo © 2017 by V. Nesdoly)

After
stone-bottom burrow
this sleek white thoroughfare
is a bug’s sci-fi fantasy
new world!

Silver

Street vendor sugar bowl (Photo © 2017 by V. Nesdoly)

Silver
imperfections
can’t hide your sweet intent
like grey hair, wrinkled face of our
Granny

All the above © 2017 by Violet Nesdoly (All rights reserved)
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This post is linked to Poetry Friday, hosted today by Linda at Teacher Dance.

 

 

Technician

Yesterday I had a medical procedure which needed an intravenous line to insert contrast dye. My experience at the medical centre was unusually drawn-out as apparently I have what they call “rolly veins” (which have the good sense to slip away from needles).

The workers were wonderful, though. And in the hour it took to get that chunk of hardware into me, I had lots of time to study them. One technician particularly snagged my attention.

Image: Pixabay

Her pants were green, her vest was blue
her top turquoise and peach
her hair a tidy dreadlock mop
Africa tinged her speech.

She worked with warm efficiency
to get an I.V. started
but four pokes chasing slippery veins
left her a bit downhearted:

“You’re my first patient of the day,
fear it will be a bad one.”
She warmed my arms with towels and sheets
handed me to the next one.

Two more technicians tried their luck
I felt like a pincushion,
with bandaids sprinkling both my arms—
unfortunate condition.

“She left her veins at home,” she quipped.
“She is the one to blame.”
Then kept on checking back until
the I.V. doctor came.

© 2016 by Violet Nesdoly (All rights reserved)

 

Alert to blessings

When my friend Laurel asked me to be part of her Advent blog, Toward Christmas, I was delighted to accept. On these 24 days of preparing for Christmas, six of us are reviewing the Jesse Tree characters of Jesus’ story. One of the characters I chose to write about was Jacob (I think it was the ladder that made me think this would be a fun poem to write). The challenge was also to write this in prose poetry.

I read and re-read Jacob’s story (Genesis 27 & 28) before getting an idea. It came when I saw THREE. Jacob was blessed, not once, twice, but three times. Immediately I thought of folk and fairy tales, where things always come in threes.

One thing I noticed about Jacob and these three blessings is that they didn’t easily sink in. He wasn’t any happier after getting them, at least the first two, and they didn’t change his circumstances for the better, at least not in the short term.

I imagine he felt guilty and distracted when he got the first blessing. After all, he had just manipulated his blind father and he knew how angry Esau could get.

The second blessing, spoken over him by his father as Jacob was leaving home, may have sounded more like a cruel joke than a blessing, seeing as how everything was going exactly the opposite to what his father was saying.

It was finally when he saw, in his dream, the angels ascending and descending to heaven and heard words delivered in the voice of God Himself, complete with the beautiful promise, “Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go…”  that Jacob realized he was blessed, and could go forward with a light heart (Genesis 28:15).

I think I’m often like Jacob when it comes to God’s gifts. Sometimes it’s circumstances, worries, preoccupations, even guilt if I’ve done some manipulating, that keep me from seeing them. At other times, those supposed-to-be blessings don’t seem like blessings at all but their opposite. What will it take to make me see God’s gifts, His blessings, that are all around me, the greatest of which is His constant presence (Psalm 139:17,18)?

Isaac blesses Jacob – by Gerrit Willemsz Horst

A tale of three blessings

Once upon a time there were three blessings.

First Blessing came to Prince as he, sweating under goat skins and drowning in his brother’s clothes, knelt before his blind father. Despite bequeathing him earthy richness, grain, wine, and a promise of the servitude of nations, the stench in the tent of goat stew and lies kept Prince from hearing a single word.  Read the rest on the Toward Christmas blog…

Join us each week for Spiritual Journey Thursday

This post is part of Spiritual Journey Thursday hosted by Holly Mueller at her blog Reading, Teaching, Learning.

 

The Custodian

The Custodian

The coffee cups we take into the sanctuary
she sees as spots to scrub from the carpet later.
On youth night she braces herself
for toilets plugged with paper towel
sinks clogged with toilet paper.
The inconspicuous, numberless door
in the hallway we’ve never really noticed—
she has the key to it
could find Pinesol, rolls of tissue
jugs of antibacterial soap and Windex
without stumbling over the industrial octopus
that splays its floppy hoses
all over the floor.
She knows who ambles in
bleary-eyed and tousle-headed
for prayer on Tuesday morning at 6:00
and on her 1:00 p.m. round remembers
to check between sofa cushions in the café
for crunched napkins and balls of plastic wrap.
On Alpha night she is there with her bucket
to clean up kitchen spills and bathroom floods.
After the funeral tea she appears out of nowhere
to deal with the  overflowing garbage.
She comes with her key anytime to unlock any door.
Always kind, smiling, cheerful helpful, willing
she is the servant of all.
She is the greatest of all!

– Violet Nesdoly (© 2013 – All Rights Reserved)

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So far my Poem-A-Day challenge  has been going well. The poem above was yesterday’s write, inspired by Robert Brewer’s Poetic Asides prompt for Day 6:

“For today’s prompt, write a poem from the perspective of a person who either works at and/or visits a place you like to visit (that’s not yourself). For instance, a fry chef at the Krusty Krab, a bouncer at a nightclub, waitress at a restaurant, etc.”

This post is part of Poetry Friday, hosted today by Diane Mayr at Random Noodling.