Inside The Hearts' Walls

Ages go and history flows
ever repeating and growing.
Common mores get wound up and disdain,
then relax, relearn to empathize
with a lyrical writer's life passion.

Could any sanity have expected,
predicted, or dreamed,
that in two-point-five thousand years
your ardor would not be forgotten?

Yet still in the heaps
of a library's deeps
a peruser will find
a sweetbitter mind,

How could writing so ancient
and yet so fervent be?
Neglected, eponymized Sappho,
would you have selected me?

By Turtle Shell

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One of 1-25-11's "selecting a reader" poems.

What if my reader couldn't read at all?
Someone less fortunate than you and I.
Whether they be a he or a she, it doesn't matter to me.
They'd look at the canvas that holds my thoughts.
They (my words) would be open to interpretation,
After all my reader can't read.
They'd be words of inspiration, an answer to prayer.
They'd be conversation on a rainy day.
They'd be the idea of 'nothing is impossible'.
And so my reader, the he or she, they'd learn to read.
And they'd find my poem was exactly what they need.

By Erin Merrell

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One of 1-25-11's "selecting a reader" poems.  This one was sent to The Commuter for publication.

Telephone Repairman
by Joseph Millar


All morning in the February light
he has been mending cable,
splicing the pairs of wires together
according to their colors,
white-blue to white-blue
violet-slate to violet-slate,
in the warehouse attic by the river.

When he is finished
the messages will flow along the line:
thank you for the gift,
please come to the baptism,
the bill is now past due :
voices that flicker and gleam back and forth
across the tracer-colored wires.

We live so much of our lives
without telling anyone,
going out before dawn,
working all day by ourselves,
shaking our heads in silence
at the news on the radio.
He thinks of the many signals
flying in the air around him
the syllables fluttering,
saying please love me,
from continent to continent
over the curve of the earth.

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The prompt for next week is: "We live so much of our lives without telling anyone".

Also, at next week's club meeting we will be viewing photos taken by students in the photography department (I think), and we will each get to choose one to write a poem on. After the club's loyal members show up to take their pick next Tuesday, I'll try to post the pictures or links to them online so that everyone else can pick at our scraps perhaps choose one to write about as well.

This was just submitted by a friend of the LBCC Poetry Club. A bit early, but hey, why not?

Selecting A Reader

She is as naked as I am
and passionate
about show don't tell.

For club members who wish to read a poem at the upcoming (Thursday, March 10, 2011 @ 7:30PM) choir concert, the due date for submission of your work is Tuesday, February 22.  Remember, we want one to one-and-a-half minutes long, and language suitable for general audiences.


I feel a little weird that the singers get have to sing songs written by others, but we poets are expected get to use our own original work at this event. It is of course a great honor and privilege, but I'm worrying about whether or not I'll be capable of writing anything worthy of reciting to a potentially sold-out auditorium. If I were allowed to just memorize and perform Annabel Lee (for example) I would at least know that I had material to share that's worthy of such attention. But will anything I've written or will write be worthy to take up the time of such a crowd? Oh well. It might be. I've still got time to work on it.

First, I would have her be beautiful,
and walking carefully up on my poetry
at the loneliest moment of an afternoon,
her hair still damp at the neck
from washing it. She should be wearing
a raincoat, an old one, dirty
from not having money enough for the cleaners.
She will take out her glasses, and there
in the bookstore, she will thumb
over my poems, then put the book back
up on its shelf. She will say to herself,
"For that kind of money, I can get
my raincoat cleaned." And she will.

Ted Kooser

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The prompt for 1-25-11's club meeting is "selecting a reader".  If you could have exactly one person read your poetry, who would it be?

by Turtle Shell


In studying the difference
between solitude and loneliness
I'm wondering if grins
are interludes and only this.
I amble past people
a hedge 'round my soul,
brambles that creep 'till
I've edged down a hole.


Solitude is having the time and space to work on your project until you get it juuuuuust right.
Loneliness is wishing you had someone to show what a good job you did.

Solitude is being in a place where you could strip naked and no one but you would care.
Loneliness is wishing someone cared.

I've been studying the difference
between solitude and loneliness
a bit too much lately.
I wish I could stop.