Day the twenty-sixth

Today the prompt is to answer a list of categories and use the answers for a poem. I have a short attention span and the first category is weather - so - rain.


Chorley Market

Today is a Chorley Market sort of day
A buying faggots sort of day
A buying biscuits sort of day
A buying second hand biscuits sort of day
A buying fabric sort of day
A buying black pudding sort of day
A buying cheese sort of day.

Today is a Chorley Market sort of day
Where the puddles are congregating
Where the cars are lined up in by the station
Where the queues have umbrellas
Where the buses hiss and splash
Where the cafe windows are steamed up
Where the rain drips down your neck.

Yes, today is a Chorley Market sort of day.

Day the twenty-fifth

Today the prompt is to be inspired by a given poem. I took the words "in every room a shawl tossed untidily upon a chair or bed".

Last days

In every room in this abandoned house
There lives a memory, subsisting on dust
And echoes, and wearing just
A shawl across weary shoulders
That have borne a life of rainstorm and trial.

Silent footsteps pave across the floor and
Their tread is imagined in every sheet of paper
Tossed untidily aside when the last
Living residents left so precipitously,
And a single glove sits
Upon a chair and offers a mute lament for its
Long lost companion.

                                    The sleepless years
Of waiting can never ease the death
And destruction of mankind in its last days
And the pain never rests on couch or bed.

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 ninth

Today the challenge is a concrete poem, where the physical shape reflects the subject, or tries to!

Dripping


when
it is
raining
the
water
runs off
my hat
and
drips
into
my boots.

Day the fifth

Today we are given twenty prompts but I have chosen just one - to write of the future, to make a prediction.


One day

And one day, when this is all over,
We shall sing together again;
We shall join our voices and drown out
The sound of raindrops on the parched ground.
And one day, when this is all over,
We shall meet and smile at each other;
We shall embrace our past and erase
The teardrop traces for a world in thrall
To the strident demands of power and
Money, and we shall reclaim this our land.