cold

Visit to a Third Planet

Visit to a Third Planet

Who’s hungry

Raise your hands

Now those of you who have

Extra food

There are millions of you

And we’ll take it one by one

Find an outstretched hand

Take hold

Place food in it

If need be, help with preparation

Then be pleased to sit

At the table

Anyone who’s cold

Millions of you with extra blankets

One by one, gently and firmly

Place them

Around

Anyone who’s thirsty

Is a bigger deal

Because we keep poisoning the water

But for now there still is more

Pass it out in safe containers

To those for whom

Answering thirst is life

Who needs shelter

Millions of us know how to

Build roofs and walls

And bridges that will get

Each one security

To home

Now who’s lonely

Who’s afraid

Who needs countries that provide

They’re here

They can help

Can all the multitudes

Nations and people

Provide assistance

Well, we can

I think we know

That we can

We shall

C L Couch

http://thehelpfulartteacher.blogspot.com/2014/12/tiny-planets-inspired-by-little-prince.html

http://thehelpfulartteacher.blogspot.com/

Welcome to The Helpful Art Teacher, an interdisciplinary website linking visual arts to math, social studies, science and language arts.

image (kindly) used with kind permission

July 18, 2018 0

On the Cusp of a Nor’Easter (prose poem)

On the Cusp of a Nor’Easter
(prose poem)

So my friend calls from Indiana. I tell her of my sister’s new job. I am relieved and happy, because my friend’s been struggling with sufferings that would drive me mad. She sounds well and has a chance to tell me some about her family on her way to church to help lead (in technical matters) a Bible study there. It is cold here. It is colder there (single-digit degrees for many days). When she must ring off, she does. I am at the coffeemaker and place the backside of the phone on a spiral burner on the stovetop (everything turned off). While the coffee’s cooking, I clean out some plastic bottles into which I put tap water to drink throughout the day. Not thinking at first, I place the cleaned-out bottles just outside the burner circle set upon the stove. When I’ve done this four times, I have four empty bottles cornering a phone set on a burner plate of labyrinthine form. I’m sure there is a deity for winter (generally, Persephone, though I’m thinking there’s one for winter only), and have I not built a small, strange contemporary altar to her. A narrow receiver (wireless) offered up inside four plastic monoliths keeping in their stillness their own kind of sentinel watching. Is this supplication? I want my friend to be well. I want her husband to enjoy retirement and her daughter have success at school. I want the cold to move on, over there, though for a Midwest winter season, I guess what is endured is rather normal. (Still too cold.) My temps in southern Pennsylvania still have two digits. But we are called to be ourselves storm-ready against a coming, miles-wide soon-arriving gale. It smacks the South and later rounds out to sea—on the way releasing slivering ice and snow and the season’s other dangers onto our regional metropoles: D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. And in my small town? I pray for navigable roads. In my small place, I pray for electricity’s constancy—that it might faithfully provide sufficient heat in rapport with the thermostat. And now I guess I wait. We wait. I clear the stove and leave on the burner now a single cup, ready for coffee. The empty ceramic vessel a suburban symbol of encouragement and also, I think, of supplication.

January 21, 2016 4

Cold, Concrete Poem, Anaphora/Epistrophe (Symploce)

Walking in Autumnal Days Away

above is a link to a .doc filed in my WordPress library; as far as I know, if you have MS Word, you can open this just fine; if not, please let me know; you see, I wrote the text and then tried to re-cast it, as it were, into a sidewalk shape using text-box blocks (not that clever, I know–and they wouldn’t transfer to WordPress); then I embellished the original text with a second conversation within about sidewalks; for just the original words, look below (no shape, though, and no second conversation)

Walking in Autumnal Days Away by C L Couch

And I simply like the fall is all
And walking down the walk
Past the library that is across
The street from the haunted house
Really, with tall and iron spikes
With arrow points along the tops
That make the rail, well, rail

[everything smushed into a sidewalk square, a new box opened, and so on]

And I simply like the fall is all
And walking down the walk
Past the brick place with a roof
That we could huddle under
Waiting for the bus to school
Or town—the fumes from passing
Trucks and cars also huddled with us

And I simply like the fall is all
And walking down the walk
Back then, I used to like the crunch the leaves
Even the chores to come that
Crunching would remind me
The dogs would need some care
And everything raked up and packed

And I simply like the fall is all
And walking down the walk
We’re told this winter will be milder
Which is fine with me, since I
Recall the season when the bridge
Fell down across the city river
But I’ll take a cold autumn, thanks

And I simply like the fall is all
And walking down the walk

The walk I have is broken through
With roots of tree, but so am I
Broken bricks and not-so-smooth
Concrete: am I not made of the
Same stuff, I think—but I do like
The fall and the unevenness of life
The walk, even upended, invites

And I simply like the fall and
Cold-autumnal days; the shorter
Nights are sad through there is
Good thought in the melancholy
And I like the walk and walking
It’s an easier exercise to do
Which is why, however wet or uneven

And I simply like the fall is all
And walking down the walk

And so let’s talk

October 16, 2015 6