The idea for this workshop came from a Second Light workshop I attended last weekend with Hannah Lowe. After giving us an example of a poem written as a personal ad which you can read here:
Personals by CD Wright Anna Asked us to write our own personal ads and to make them interesting the instruction was to begin with a night time confession.
This is really fun to do. Try thinking about your routines, quirky or mundane, your .dreams and your .your longings and include them in this poem
For further inspiration here is the poem I wrote at the workshop:
Personal Ad
Sometimes I sleep naked;
I like the feel of cool linen sheets on my skin.
I don’t like total blackness,
I leave the skylight uncurtained and the blind in the window open
to let in the moonlight and the slow rays of morning.
I have water by my bed in a china mug. And my books.
A whole toppling pile of them for those moments in the night
when I cannot sleep. On walks
I like my hand held.
And I long to be rowed to the centre of a vast lake,
to lay back on cushions and watch the clouds shift.
Susan Jane Sims
The deadline for this was June 4th
About me at night there is little to be said (me being asleep mostly)
Still, there are things about me at other times to be said.
I used to cut and shape steel into all kinds of things
Now I make all kinds of things with words
And sometimes forget to tend my garden for days.
When I’m not here (which is often) I tend to be
On some mountain (in my head) looking
At all the different routes down.
Once I climbed a mountain.
If I were to climb it again (perhaps with someone else)
I would go down by a different route.
Michael Docker
Love the ending Michael, suggesting you might like an adventure.It reminds me of Frost’s poem The Road Not Taken.
My Ad -The Rain
I like it when it rains at night,
Times when mundane tasks absorb the day,
When the hose hangs dry
and the garden thirsts and droops.
I lie beneath my summer quilt,
knowing nature will ,what I hadn’t.
Not a drizzle ,a mere caress that
leaves a dampness on the ground,
It’s the light and sound of nature
that I like,
Flash,bang,crash,
as the skies zip open
to pour its goodness on the earth.
I like rain that twists and turns
in the reckless wind,
deadheading flowers and branches
past their prime,
Cleansing as it moves away.
I wait for the pause after .
The deep silence of peace,
When the mind and heart slows
and merges with the soul.
Leela Gautam
Dazzling imagery Leela. I love ‘the garden thirsts and droops’ and ‘Flash, bang, crash/ as the skies zip open’. A thoughtful poem.
Twilight
maybe not, but maybe I am a twilight person,
though that’s nothing to do with Yeats’ Celtic twilight—
sure, I should be so lucky to write the way that he did!—
and the old cliché goes that sitting on the fence
can give you splinters where it hurts
maybe it’s true, yet
(here I go again!) I can’t imagine living
totally in light,
utterly in night…
not only that: twilight is also seeing
(always) both sides of the issue,
hushed by the enormity of the question
although everyone around me stands shouting out
with the infinite clarity, the diamond certainty
of day or night or night or day…
while I like the contemplative quiet, the silence
of the loud sun’s dimming & dipping
down,
of stars igniting while ideas & dreams come streaming
like flickering bats or early meteor showers
across the silver spaces of my mind
looking backwards into the warm of summer’s light
and onwards into the calm of night,
enjoying the hush, the stillness
of that huge fruit-bowl of sky at twilight
with its twinkling & sprinkling
of raspberry stars & blueberry stars
Lizzie Ballagher
Very philospohical, Lizzie.Some lovely images. I particularly like @silver spaces of my mind’.
A hundred miles .
I always sleep on the same side
My head is turned
with my right hand under my pillow.
My left arm must not touch it
but may go where it chooses.
My mornings are early
and fast and slow.
I cover a hundred miles
in words.
Sprinting through my life
and the lives of others.
I rest in between
and stretch my toes to recover
from the journey
and lean against my pile of pillows.
Angie Butler
A comforting poem.
