Welcome to Sifting the Rubble's weekly blog and podcast of my poem-a-day challenge for 2022. I am your host, and poet, Emily Gibson. The poems for the 36th week of the year, September 3 to 9, were born in events of the week, including a bicycle traveler from the UK and the ring of fire surrounding Bend, as well as a bevy of prompts harvested from Rattle's daily poetry emails.
I would be remis if I didn't explain for those new to this podcast that these are 1 or 2 day poems, which have not gone through the grist of revision. That comes later, something I truly look forward to doing. For now, they are freshly hatched, still a little wet around the ears. Yet each has something to say, so I share them, uncensored. It is part of my challenge.
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And now, for this week's poems!
Poem #246, Pedaler of Persistence
by Emily Gibson, Sept 3, 2022
With a cheerful demeanor and classic Brit wit,
A lanky cyclist pedaled up for respite.
A seasoned tourist on wheels, with grit,
He arrived happy as if he flew in on a kite.
Enjoyed his first avocado, ever, sans pit.
New to hard-boiled eggs, asked how to eat right!
Over dinner he regaled tales not yet writ
with manner and words eloquently polite.
Each story the power of persistence did illicit
as endless woes arose. Most would take flight,
toss their gear in the air like confetti and quit.
Instead, he rides on, to peddle persistent insight.
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by Emily Gibson, Sept 4, 2022
Like a lava eruption from its top,
this mountain’s feet are wrapped in hot.
A liquid earth but not from its core,
scorches and blackens in a roar.
Lava of light echoes in stars’ visions,
who’s distant factories of atomic collisions
illuminate their own planets in memory,
while our moon reflects our star’s energy
back to earth, in preparation for tomorrow,
when tears will roll: our salty, molten sorrow.
Photo Credit: LOKI O. BOONE Loki Boone (@lombwolf) • Instagram photos and videos
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Mill Fire, Weed, CA, Sept 2022
About "Molten Mountain": The Mill Fire erupted in Weed, just north of Mt. Shasta. This fast-moving fire made for some stunning photos, while it burned through a section of town destroying much in its wake. I saw this photo by Loki Boone which made me want to write this poem of rhymed couplets. You can see more of their photos on their Instagram, linked above.
Poem #248, Earth’s Show
by Emily Gibson, Sept 5, 2022
Earth, not to be outdone by Jupiter
or Saturn, with their layers of colored
clouds, puts on her own show
in lines of smoke and mountains
to skew her skies purple and red.
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Cascade Mountains, looking west from Bend, Or, Sept 2022
About "Earth's Show": While we may all think Earth is a jewel when seen from outer space, an outlier with its blue from life-giving water, I have wondered if Earth might feel like an outsider and dream to be like the other planets in our star's family whose shades favor reds, oranges, and purples. Seeing our skies filled with the smoke layers of color, and my wonderings combined into this poem.
Poem #249, What I See, an Ekphrastic Poem
by Emily Gibson, Sept 6, 2022
A bevy of turtles swims crowded beneath
a sea turned gold with morning’s sun.
A peloton of humans wielding wheelchairs rolls,
turns a hill of yellow clay to airborne powder.
An army of riderless horses thunders home,
their wake a land festooned with a chaos of fire.
A drum core in their final percussive finale pounds
a cascade of last notes. Triumphant sticks smoke.
What do you see?
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Abstract, by Bonnie Riedinger
About "Ekphrastic Poem on Abstract Art": I mined the poem prompts in Rattle (a poetry magazine/blog/website) to expand my capabilities. This prompt provided a piece of abstract artwork, copied above, and gave a challenge to write an ekphrastic poem, or a poem inspired by the art. Different bits of the art conjured different images for me, which I described in short couplets.
Poem #250, A Tritina Poem on Climate Change
by Emily Gibson, Sept 7, 2022
Fires scorch lands rural and urban, each day a new record.
Grasses, crops, starched collars, everything wilts in such heat.
We must learn how to tilt shade umbrellas the perfect degrees.
The climate has tipped, now known by even those without degrees.
I feel guilt using electricity to make toast, heat water or play a record.
Sweltering track teams vote to end matches after just one heat.
Relationships crumble under emotions of intense heat.
The trees will succumb eventually. They die by degrees.
Will there be anything the future can read in our fossil record?
Daily, meteorologists record the heat, in degrees Fahrenheit and Celsius.
About "A Tritina Poem on Climate Change": Another poetry prompt from Rattle, I chose this one because a Tritina Poem was a completely new form to me. In a Tritina, three words are used as the end words in three Tercets (stanzas of 3 lines), with all three words used in the final tenth line. In the prompt, we had to take a news article, put the text into a word cloud generator, and then use the top 3 words as the end of line words. I used an article about extreme heat, since my county is surrounded by fires at this time. The three words generated in the word cloud were Record, Heat, and Degrees. In the poem, I used a different meaning for each of the three words, in the tercets.
Poem #251, Cubist Poetry
by Emily Gibson, Sept 8, 2022
Pale pink light from a single bulb helps a pitcher
cast shadows, darkens green, orange, and yellow
citrus wedges, cut by a dull knife that sends sprays
of essence in fragrant arcs across a lonely kitchen.
The pale pink pitcher darkens fragrant shadows.
A lonely kitchen casts green, orange, and yellow light
cut into dull sprays of essence across citrus bulbs.
An arc from a single knife sends wedges to help.
A lone knife darkens pale shadows of essence.
A spray of green, orange, and yellow cuts a pitcher
into wedges of dull fragrance cast across pink
kitchen bulbs that help send single citrus lights.
A lonely essence darkens arcs of light to cut wedges
cast from a single pitcher and sends citrus across
sprays of pale pink fragrance which help dull a
kitchen knife’s bulb with green, orange, and yellow shadows.
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Still Life by Stefan Silvestru
About "Cubist Poetry": The third poetry prompt I found in Rattle poetry emails, this one asked me to write a Cubist Quatrain based on a piece of Cubist Art of my choice. I found a still life by Stefan Silvestru, which is shown above. The first quatrain depicts the work of art in rich sensory detail, and the following 3 quatrains rearrange the elements of the first, to reveal new insights, as a cubist artist rearranges elements to reveal new relationships between forms. This was a highly challenging and entertaining prompt, one that I want to repeat again.
Poem #252 Happiness
by Emily Gibson, Sept 9, 2022
“Happiness is not the point; it is the byproduct.” --Matt Embry, MS Hope
Happiness is an intangible substance,
only visible by the contours of its container.
Like an armful of balloons, the harder you grasp
the faster it jettisons away from your sphere.
Just as with love, the more you think you must have it, now,
the more elusive it is, or disturbed it is when it arrives.
Similar to sanity, one can’t say whether someone else
has it or lost it or found it or never had it at all.
And it certainly isn’t determined by external markers
of relationships, financial situations or possessions.
It’s almost like a reward for actions driven by the true self.
So go live large, and let happiness sneak up on you.
