You are a bird-understander
Better than I could ever be
Who make so many noises
And call them song (Craig Arnold Bird-understander)
Birds at my feeder don’t sing
They eat and savor all the sweet
Birds in need their voices raise
How dare I tell in want their praises
Won’t reach heaven’s ears
Take all my loves, my love,
Yea, take them all (take all my loves, my love, yea, take them all: (William Shakespeare Sonnet 40)
A care-less love
May care too much
So,
leave a kiss but in the cup
And I’ll not look for wine. (Ben Jonson Drink to me only with thine eyes)
If bitterness doth leave it’s scent
I’ll know ‘twas never really mine
Princes do but play us; compared to this
All honor’s mimic, all wealth alchemy (John Donne The sun rising)
Old potions brewed and sold as new
Will never stand the test of time
If pledge be to love alone
True love surely will survive
Napowrimo I have no idea how to follow this prompt correctly, so I did what I want. I chose lines from four of the examples given of love poems, and added my verse to each.
And the words “doth” and “’twas” make it authentically poetic.
Until next April….
“ now – our final (but still optional!) prompt. Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a cento. This is a poem that is made up of lines taken from other poems. If you’d like to dig into an in-depth example, here’s John Ashbery’s cento “The Dong with the Luminous Nose,” and here it is again, fully annotated to show where every line originated. A cento might seem like a complex undertaking – and one that requires you to have umpteen poetry books at your fingertips for reference – but you don’t have to write a long one. And a good way to jump-start the process is to find an online curation of poems about a particular topic (or in a particular style), and then mine the poems for good lines to string together. You might look at the Poetry Foundation’s collection of love poems, or its collection of poems by British romantic poets, or even its surprisingly expansive collection of poems about (American) football.