2024 - day twenty-six

 The prompt is to use alliteration, consonance and assonance.

As evening falls I gaze across the Flow

And see the sunlit sky reflected far below.

A rare time this, with barely any wind,

A setting sun, and curlew's calls to find

The memories of a soft spring changing day.

Sun-warm, rain-washed, and not yet May.

2024 - day fourteen

 The prompt is anaphora.

Another Orkney Anthem.

Still the wind tugs and tosses the grass back and forth,

Still the waves carry words and tales from the north.

Still the rain patterns windows with mysterious words

Still in runes long forgotten in these harsh modern worlds.

Still the dusk creeps its fingery shadows long and long

Still the seals in the night share their ghostly sad song.

Still the cold of the spring says that winter has won

Still the heralds of summer are born in by the sun.

Still this land that is history, that is sea, sand and stone

Still this land gives a birth to blood, flesh and bone.

(c)2ndwitch

2024 - day three

 Today the prompt is a surreal prose poem.

Swartmill.

The sea, a swirling cacophony of grey and green, writhes beneath the steel grey sky and calls, seductively to the birds that circle ceaselessly above it, crying and screaming of last years triumphs or perhaps of fish that once caught escaped and became eels that then wriggled and wiggled their way into the land round the loch, became wormified and worried, dodging fleecy feet that stamp and stomp on rain sodden ground until a man stops and smiles, watching the silent and invisible upheaval.

(c)2ndwitch, 03/04/24

Day the fourteenth

Today the prompt is a poem, poet or person that is your inspiration. My thoughts turn straightway to Edwin Muir . . .

The horses

The day the horses returned was the first day of normal rain.
That morning the clouds had foregathered in massed ranks
Of steel grey cushions, sky bound in wind-driven train,
A storm of nature's making, and we could give thanks.

Until this day the world had rained poison and dripped death,
Echoes of armageddon reverberated in each thunder clap,
And fear laced the raindrops, the wind's ice-sharded breath
Seemed to us, cowered in shelter, to be one more killing trap.

But once the radios were silent, and the ships had sailed on,
The skies slowly lightened, night brought the moon out and stars,
We slowly emerged in the tentative light of a revisiting sun
To walk once again on the land that in healing was ours.

And this day the clouds brought us rain and a promise
And in the evening the horses to join us in harness.

Day the third

Today the prompt suggested taking random words and, finding various rhymes for them, then use some in a poem. Some years ago I was told that one should NEVER use a word of more than 2 syllables in a poem - and as you can see I always heed that advice . . .

Invisible threat


The rain now makes it difficult to walk as
The damp underfoot means different shoes
And the intensification of the frustration of steps.
The rain makes the earthy smells stronger and richer
And the photographic excellence of the resultant
Picture presents a needed antidote to the pestilence
That besmirches our islands, that spreads
in soundless menace, wastelanded mainland
And island, consumed by a silent rapacious predator.

Day the second

The prompt is to write about a specific place.


Yesnaby

The rain is horizontal
Driving, cold, relentless,
The wind whips the waves
Into froth and ice-steam
Drenching the cliffs
And despite it all
Primula Scotica stands small.