Letters of a Voyage

I don't want to jinx myself, but I think this may be the best sonnet I have written all summer. Big Tent Poetry asked for a poem about something you do with your hands, essentially to write about the motion or action. I didn't quite do that, but it did get me thinking about holding hands. We do with with some many different people and it means so many different thing, but is essentially the thing that grounds us. The inspiration for the first octave was the image of a child running along the beach. It's such a happy image, but carries so many dangers- drowning, pecked to death by gulls, getting lost or kidnapped, attacked by rabid gulls, etc. The original inspirations for the sextet were a) The Coldplay song "Til Kingdom Comes" (Hold my head inside your hands,/I need someone who understands./I need someone, someone who hears,/For you, I've waited all these years.) and an surprisingly beautiful, meandering X-files fan fic I once read in which Scully says to Mulder "I don't want to be alone, who will hold my hand."  (I don't know why I have to write tons and tons of backround for fourteen measly lines) 

 

( Across the Beach )
The last lines are either about a meteor shower, or the end of the world. If I am lucky, there will one day be graduate students using their master theses to take a stand on the ever important meteor or apocalypse debate in the work of G. Sand.

(Confidential to merrycaepa : Most of this was written pre-Van Gogh, I swear I only stole the last. )

I remain,
Georgie

A catch-up sonnet from last week. I decided to bag the Big Tent prompt for this week and instead wrote about the mummy in the Egyptian gallery of the museum I work it. I may or may not have written this sonnet surreptitiously while on post--I didn't get caught, which is what counts. The idea came to me when I heard a grown man (wearing a "Pirate for Hire" t-shirt) say of the Egyptian collection, that the magical value that the objects had for ancient Egyptians is largely disregarded. While mulling that fact over, I became increasingly frustrated with the visitors response to our mummy, Kai-i-Nefri. First of all, yes, folks it's a real mummy; if the label says human remains, it's human remains. Secondly, everyone seemed to react with either horror (ew, gross, dead body) or awe (look at the really old thing from an exotic culture), which it is. But it's also the body of a human being. We know he died unnaturally young, probably late 20s, and I wished someone would look at that mummy and see a son, or brother, or at the very least a human being. And rather than strangle the next 13 year-old girl who said "Ew, gross," I wrote a sonnet.

 

( To Kai-i-Nefri: A Museum Mummy )
And if anyone tells my boss, I'm writing sonnets on the job...

I remain,
Georgie

So I am posting an unfinished poem this week, fate conspired against me I guess. Big Tent's prompt for last week was about steganography--"security through obscurity." I got quickly discourage because, like last week, I felt like I was spending too much energy being clever to fulfill the prompt, than really writing poetry. So in the future, I am going to be more judicous about whether I use the prompt, or just write from another prompt source.

But I am proud of my idea, so I'll post what I do have

( Motivation )