Poem for Magpie Tales, One Stop's Free Verse Meme and One Shot Wednesday....

Update July 17-- little did I know that the marvelous manly mythic poet Brendan McOdrum would link to my work in his piece on Poetry and Myth today.  I think he may have been especially referring to the second poem in this post, The Wrack of Shells, which refers to Venus' birth from the sea...xxxj

Thanks to Tess Kincaid, poet extrordinaire, for photo prompt up at Magpie Tales, and poet Sam Peralta, for cogent and fascinating essay on Free Verse up today at One Stop Poetry.

I'm posting the poem below, written today, for the prompt, and below that appears my poem "The Wrack of Shells," my homage to Sylvia Plath written earlier this year, originally put up at She Writes.  Enjoy!  Comment on me and I'll come to you...xJenne'

Timepiece

Now little clock of the tide

Ticking among round and shining stones

I put you to my ear

It is there—the pulse of the sea.

The sea rolling and making you

With its translucent tongue.

The mothering sea

Laving and rocking you,

Fitting your tusk-hard housing

To the slick soft bodies

Of the fluke, the snail.

Now rock, rock, in tidal foam,

Knock, knock

Nobody home

Seashell on the seashore

Darwin’s Cambrian totem

 Fearful symmetry

Out of Narragansett

Endlessly rocking

Porcelain keys

To the how and why

Of thou, me—

Nacre carapace,

Once mollusked husk

Algonquin wampum

This orchestra’s all percussion--

Mnemonic knucklebones 

Shamanistic sand-worn

Vacant sea-homes

This bone-clatter colloquy

Of moon-miming shells.

--copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011

 #2 -- As noted, posted earlier around Plath would-have been birthday; much, much is to be learned about the craft of poetry in reading Sylvia Plath.

To the memory of Sylvia Plath

  

“A lone beachcomber squats among the wrack
Of kaleidoscope shells
Probing fractured Venus with a stick
Under a tent of taunting gulls.

No sea-change decks the sunken shank of bone
That chucks in backtrack of the wave;
Though the mind like an oyster labors on and on,
A grain of sand is all we have.”

From Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea, Sylvia Plath

How then, our fractured girl

Did Venus too break apart at low tide

In scattered porcelain shards

Beneath our bare feet

Perhaps two disrobed

On the white sand

Before the indignant witness

Of rumpled waves

And stood revealed

As dual wounds

Red mouths made to leach

Brine, and lacerate--

Speaking words that abrade

The withdrawing sea leaves

Silted wrack

To seal small graves

Oysters drop pearls there

Bright confessions

Let slip from yearning tongues

  

And phantom sea stars

Bivouac in the ruins

Of the houses of the sand

Where love birthed herself

Rising sun-tinted

To stun and stripped

Tease the wayward young

This makes a lonely

Beachcomber brave:

I come unto you

Wet and singing,

But no sea-change checks

The sighing storm

That unnerves a hungry wave

You surge, stunning me with your white crest

And then pull back

To the unlit monasteries of the sea

As if to know me then and there

Has turned your blood to water:

Now I am a grain of sand

Burning on in the bone-house

Of a shell.

 Copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011