Today’s prompt comes from Madeline Sharples.
Here’s Madeline’s prompt: Write a “Wheel” poem: of fortune, ferris, bike, auto – any kind of wheel. Even a big wheel and wheeling and dealing will do.
Robert’s attempt at a Wheel Poem:
“Spinning my wheels”
Yesterday, I saw my friend sitting on a bench
staring at birds, and I asked him how we was
doing. He said, “Fine. Just fine.” “Just fine,”
I asked. “Yes, fine,” he said. “Just swell.”
“I thought you were fine,” I said. “Well,” he said,
“that too, but I’m really all right.” “Which one
do you feel the most,” I asked. “I suppose,”
he started to say and then he got distracted
by a squirrel working its way along a branch
before jumping to another branch in another
tree, and then my friend was up and walking
away from me without an explanation or
a good-bye, which was fine with me, because
I took his spot and his seat was still warm
and those birds were still darting from tree
to tree and the squirrel was still working
this way and that and there was not another
person in the park who might ask how I was.
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Thank you, Madeline, for the circular prompt! Click here to learn more about Madeline.
Click here if you prefer using the WD Forum thread.
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Follow me on Twitter @robertleebrewer
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Explore Poetry!
Learn more about poetic forms, poetic terms, poetic schools, and more about the history of poetry with John Drury’s The Poetry Dictionary, a wonderful poetic reference for any poet’s desk. In fact, my copy is always within arm’s reach of where I’m sitting.
On Two Wheels
(Day 19)
See me ride
my bicycle,
see how high I fly.
I can reach the silvered
moon, and catch the shining star.
Wheels
By the time he took the pulpit each Sunday,
we knew the sermon outlines, the illustrations,
the key verses he would read—always King James
back them. At the dinner table Saturday,
he’d run it by us, more talk than lecture,
and all week long, he’d visit the sick,
carry a sack of groceries to those down on their luck.
Sure, he was a preacher. Nobody questioned it,
but he was a hoss trader too, knew in his guts
a good deal on a tract of land, a used car,
a rent house. As I approached sixteen,
he dampened my enthusiasm. I wanted wheels
but not just any wheels. He suggested a Ford Falcon,
a Gremlin, something heavy and safe, no temptation
for car thieves, an AM radio was good enough surely.
The wheels he finally delivered—a rebuilt wreck,
but sport, red—was a greater gift than I dreamed:
Years later, when I began these negotiations
with children of my own, eager to hit the road,
we could honestly say, Be grateful. You should
have seen what my dad gave me to drive at sixteen.
Okay now that’s funny my loong poem posts my longer poem posts my sliver of a poem too fast
the ferris wheel
child fancy sinks under
rising waters
Ode to Wheels
Thank you for your roundness
perfect circles.
Sometimes it seems your shape
surrounds everything.
You take us places we want to go
and some we don’t.
And are with us when we grow
bicycles rollerblades.
You can be a status symbol
or ordinary
as the boy next door.
A major
player in the Indianapolis 500
yet you do
your part in my garden
wheelbarrow
hand plow
and in the overall harvest
tractors
combines.
Sometimes you are naughty
lover’s lane
elope
when you burn rubber.
Who does
not admire a well-rounded
wheel?
Wish I was there the first
time
you helped us lift our
heavy load.
Wheel
You are a gossamer firefly with coal black eyes
among copper urns, fold silk robes,
pin loose hair back
and
wheel around the world,
a spool,
with golden thread
woven into the ash colored night
Catching up…
A wheel of a tale!
At the wheel of my Corolla,
I hit a poet tree.
The impact was so great,
a poem came out of me.
Now I’m crashing into walls,
convertibles and buses,
but no more poems come out of me;
all I get is scratches.
I could not do the challenge yesterday, but I am back. http://hopefuljo.wordpress.com/2012/11/19/365-creativity-project-day-315/
Flat Tire
The tire on my friend’s wheelbarrow
went flat from sitting too long.
There’s so much inertia to overcome
and get it moving again.
So I push it with a start and a stop,
to clear a space,
start, stop and plop
until it rests on the flat spot.
I figure life is like the wheel barrow,
that it goes flat with inactivity.
When I return to the garage
I help her sort through the clutter
and move through memories of her life.
15 Minutes of Fame
my mother-in-law
appeared on ‘Wheel of Fortune’
but she won sod all
Turning Cartwheels
she begs me to watch
as she performs three cartwheels
one for each of us
laughing as her wig falls off
exposing the surgeon’s scars
Setting the Wheels
When I was a kid my dad and I set up
our model trains under the Christmas tree –
HO scale, smaller and more fragile than
the hefty Lionels he had when he was young.
Everything was scaled down, small enough
to put a whole town beneath our Scotch pine –
cars, people and buildings, a church,
5&10 store, gas station, post office,
and several snow-covered homes.
The steam locomotive puffed “real” smoke
and pulled box cars, gondola cars, tankers,
and a caboose, working hard just to go
around and around a big oval enclosing
the small-town scene. Being smaller,
it was more likely to jump the tracks,
so it was my job to inspect the couplings
and the wheels, make sure everything
connected and rolled smoothly, and to right
frequent derailments like some demigod,
putting the wayward train back on track,
feeling the groove of each wheel slip
into place inside of the rail, then sending it
chugging again on its single-minded mission,
even though it would never really leave town.
Poetics Aside November Challenge – Day 19
Write a wheel poem
At The Fair (shadorma)
A wheel you sit on?
Spins around
open space.
Meet me at the carousel,
clutching painted horse.
Spin the Wheel
Back in the day,
(my but that makes me
sound so old),
Gran and I used to watch
Jeopardy together when I
was visiting during the summer.
If she had grown up in
my generation, Gran
probably would have
ended up with an MFA.
I don’t know if she had a
photographic memory, but
she was already well north
of 70 then, and I can’t remember
anything she ever forgot.
Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune.
They bridged a programming
gap between the
Nightly News and
Prime Time.
Now, game show/reality shows
have invaded
Prime Time TV.
From Survivor to the Biggest
Loser. From American Idol to
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
From Cash Cab to
Dancing With the Stars.
Maybe I just like to remember
back to when I watched
Jeopardy with Gran, when
Alex Trebek didn’t have
a full head of white hair
(thus reminding me of my own).
And I also remember why I
gave up my TV.
Ellen Knight
Raclette
I fall apart now.
I drip
onto a plate
underneath me.
I can’t help it.
The fire is warm.
I am so sleepy,
and I lack arms
to get myself
back together.
We are inside,
the things
that used to be
outside.
I think I used to be
a cow, or inside a cow,
or some part of a cow.
I don’t know, but there
was grass somewhere
and I seem to remember
its taste. Maybe
sunlight also.
But now
there is this fire.
It unlocks the sun
I have held.
The sheets of something
next to me used to be
cow, too, but different.
They try to talk to me,
but I can only catch
a word or two,
because we are so
different, and so much
has happened since
the time when we were
cows. The potatoes
and gherkins, I don’t
even bother with.
They just say
their own names
over and over again,
and it seems to me that
we should forget
our names, now that
(as I believe) we will soon
become people.
The moon. For once, I am a little sorry I didn’t get six opportunities to edit.
Thoon moon must be in alignment with Orion’s left foot – tonight everything posted on the first try!
Ezekiel
People keep pressing me to explain that night,
what I saw, the fire within fire, one creature alive
with many faces, and all I can tell you is this:
We exist inversely with the stars. In these times
there is scarcely night, and we do not fear the desert.
The voice of humanity, once many waters, floods
its cacophony through the cities, we have the appetites
of pitiful manticores, we subsume the oceans.
As children we could see everything, dust motes
revealed themselves in the sunlight of our morning.
Now we are blind; the evening blazes. You ask me,
but still, I do not know under what throne we shall live.
That’s the poem I meant to write
I like where you go with the Ezekiel story, which I confess leaves me quite baffled. But I think you have an essential element of wonder (and its loss) here:
“In these times / there is scarcely night, and we do not fear the desert.”
And
“Now we are blind; the evening blazes.”
Wonderful, sonja
Goldilocks Zone (wheel 2)
Goldilocks zone, a fluid blue
halo of oxygen scattering starlight.
Launch from orbit
to find a place of rest after
the water has been sucked from
the earth, after the water has been covered
in sheets of plastic, encased
like a memorial, like your grandmother’s
sofa, uncomfortable in life as your
hot summer skin and useless
to her after death.
Captain’s Wheel
You think you’re at the wheel
captain of your own ship
calling all the shots, a homo sapiens
gathering evidence, weighing facts
making informed decisions,
but all evidence points
to the contrary – a
gray matter – colored by
chemistry & biology,
action & reaction,
mental amoeba
manufacturing facts to fit you
r preconceived notions,
personal fictional perception of
unreality, your justifications – just a-
nother spoke in the wheel