Poem-a-Day 3: Haiku Golden Shovels

A three-line headline calls for a haiku golden shovel. Here are two.

What is history
But loss and beauty hammered
Into a burnt home.

Here's your history
Bound by tinsel and hammered
By tears into home.

May Golden Shovel #12

source: Post Names First Woman as Top Editor

 

Stars glaze the night, sending a blog post

Reporting news from time’s origin. It names

Prophets from centuries past who claim the first

Humans created histories in starlight, written by a woman

Shaman. She leads her people to a feast as

Strong storms crash on a beach leading to the top

Of a pyramid staffed by not one editor.

 

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I’m continuing to use Terrance Hayes’s Golden Shovel poem format, as proposed by the Sunday New York Times "At Home" section, for 30 Poems in 30 Days during National Poetry Month.

 

Take a newspaper headline that attracts you.

Use each word in the line as the end word for each line in your poem.

Keep the end words in order.

Describe the story that the headline is for.

The poem does not have to be about the same subject as the headline that creates the end words.

 

SOL March (5 and) 6: History

Just a week into the daily slice of life challenge, and I’ve already lost a day.

            Yesterday I could have written about going to the doctor about my eye (nothing serious, it turned out), but I didn’t want to go into the detail. So let’s say this paragraph stands in for Slice of Life 5.

            Today I am searching through old journals to find out what I can about the sale of my mother’s condo in Florida in the months after she died 11 years ago. Why am I doing this? Because last week I received a check in the mail, a check dated July 28, 2010 (11 years ago!), with an unsigned handwritten note on the stub saying, “Please note this is for the wire payment for the purchase of unite #680” — my mother’s condo. The amount of the check is far more than the amount I actually received at the time and the amount in the documentation I have. What is going on?

            So I am searching through my journals for that period to see what I noted at the time. What the journals are full of are my notes of going through my mother’s papers, mixed in with worries about the fate of the magazine I then worked for, which was either going to be sold or killed by the global corporation that owned it, in the midst of the Great Recession, as that corporation was selling or killing others of the hundred or so print trade journals.

            Death of people, and institutions.

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I’m participating in the 14th annual Slice of Life Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers. This is day 6 of the 31-day challenge.  It’s not too late to make space for daily writing in a community that is encouraging, enthusiastic, and eager to read what you have to slice about.  Join in!

 

Poem a Day, #18 (history)

Personal History

Can you say, “Fifty years ago, I (did, was, etc.)...”?

Is fifty years ago ancient history to you?

Do you think someone who is fifty is old?

Fifty years ago, I had just gotten married.

Fifty years ago, I attended the first big anti-Vietnam War demonstration.

Fifty-two years ago, I was at the March on Washington.

I never asked my parents,

“How old were you when your life became history?”

When did they start to remember “Fifty years ago, I...”?

When does your life become history?

How old do you have to be to become historical?

Is history happening every day, but

You don’t know it until fifty years later? 

 http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/the_carriage.png