8 out of 10, Part 2
My best friend Rachel gave me these 10 words, challenging me to use 8 of them in a poem:
wolfsbane
narcolepsy
defenestrate
overseer
skirr
palilogy
facinorous
wether
macrobian
cacaesthesia
Here’s what I came up with, good or bad:
Normandy
The wind gusts flailed themselves around and screamed—
Invisible children having tantrums.
Good and evil, wolfsbane and the sweet bloom,
Can—did—exist together on this ground.
The wet dirt that fell through his large fingers
Was cold and stuck together in small clumps.
Not very beach-like dirt, but here it was,
Exfoliating his hands and his mind.
He gave in to the macrobian pain.
Tears fell (or maybe, chose to jump themselves)
Onto sand with many hidden stories.
He’d never seen the beach without the blood.
He felt the fuzziness skirr from his sight.
Sweet narcolepsy of the memory
Had protected him for eons, it seemed,
Against recollections that tried to haunt.
That palilogy–“Go! Go! Go! Go! Go!”—
Suddenly awoke, reverberating.
He hadn’t heard it in sixty some years.
“And keep your rifles out of the water!”
His memories rioted, uncontrolled.
The years of trying to defenestrate
War’s mental residue was all for naught;
Anguish was the overseer this time.
Facinorous men and men of virtue
Can justify why they kill another
But forgetting the killing (how he tried!)—
Only the virtuous cannot do that.
Rachel responds:
Posted: July 26th, 2006 at 3:33 pm →
I am incredibly impressed considering that I didn’t even know what half of them meant until I went to the obscure word database.
Jan responds:
Posted: July 27th, 2006 at 9:34 am →
Wow, that was an excellent poem.
Gracie responds:
Posted: July 27th, 2006 at 9:00 pm →
YOU ROCK! Can I tell you that?
OH! Have you been eating Ben & Jerrys ice cream lately? (Nothing like a heatwave to make you dial up your ice cream habit….) They have this flavor that made me think of you: VERMONTY PYTHON! IT HAS LITTLE CHOCOLATE COWS IN IT!