Here are our favorite poems posted by our readers for the week of January 15 – 21.
First a quick little recap:
The form of the week was The Clipped Sestina.
The prompts for the week were
Prompt 1 – The Worst Town
Prompt 2 – Dialogue
Prompt 3 – Hard Questions
Prompt 4 – Spilling tea or coffee
Prompt 5 – Found beauty
Prompt 6 – RNG
Prompt 7 – Likenesses
Thank you to everyone who participated and commented their poems this week. In no particular order here are three that we especially enjoyed.
Neo’s Poem For The Worst Town
This place was wildly boring
Ten days and nights went by before seeing even a cloud
I missed having texture in my life
Last year five residents tried to take their own lives
Not from any extreme affliction, but rather the overwhelming, grey-bricked, brutalist boredom
I wish I could’ve been watching over them, like an angel, perched up on a cloud
The silver linings filled the clouds
In other towns I mean, we’ve only seen one here in all of our lives
We want to be straight with you, but it’s hard for people to hear us when all the words we could say about her are so boring.
The boredom we feel in our own lives here could fill up all the clouds in heaven.
Eamonn’s Poem For The Worst Town
The cobblestone glimmers in the sunlight, and the trees sing with the wind, but this town is cold
Its beauty an illusion and distraction from those in the cottonfield, chained
Heat whips their backs, another cruel master, but they are resolved to survive
I attend the church, shamed for who I am, but I pray my love will survive
My sweet Thomas is in those fields, and has the only warm heart in a town so cold
We whisper sweet dreams to escape this hell and go north, unchained
But dreams are easier than to break free from this town’s chains
It was December when we tried to flee, our lungs filled with cold
We made a good run but the dogs made a better one, he would not survive
Now I stand my neck chained as my blood goes cold, this town I could not survive
Eamonn’s Poem For Hard Questions
The room felt silent as the doctor’s words echoed in my head, “You have Autism.”
I wasn’t sure how to process it, do I even know my own name?
First Dyslexia, then ADHD, is this what I am?
A human filled with countless disorders, is that what I am?
The others felt normalized and expected, but Autism?
My mother says, “At least we can give it a name.”
Maybe, but I never knew I had something that needed a name.
Its clear now that I need to learn about who I am.
And apparently that means acknowledging this “Autism.”
So, hi my name is Eamonn, I have Autism, but I am far more than a diagnosis.