Tag: Bryan Ripley Crandall

Week 1 – Verselove 2025

Denise Krebs10 Comments

Today is Poetry Friday, and Matt Forrest Esenwine is hosting at his Radio, Rhythm & Rhyme blog. Matt has a poignant story about Lee Bennett Hopkins and the rainbow anthology that is dedicated to him, the Dear One.

On Saturday, I look forward to writing the next line in our progressive poem. I’ll share it Friday evening. My project for National Poetry Month is to write a poem daily with #Verselove. Here are the first few days of poems and prompts.

April 1, 2025 – The Verse Collector with Jennifer Guyor Jowett

To America, 2025
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
O, let my land be a land where Liberty
flames as it has flamed.
I hear America singing–
Believing what we don’t believe,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
God mend thine every flaw.

In order of appearance: Emma Lazarus, Langston Hughes, William Carlos Williams, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Claude McKay, Katharine Lee Bates.

April 2, 2025 – When Spring Speaks in Tricubes with Leilya Pitre

Where have you
been, little
mama quail?

All winter–
stillness. Now
I recall

your faithful
nesting, your
darts and zips

April 3, 2025 – Borrowed Rhymes with Denise Krebs

Mi amiga, my friend,
Gracias por tu ayuda again
My skills are slowly creeping
I think of Spanish while I’m sleeping
You challenge my brain,
Our sweet friendship remains.

I used to study solo alone;
No ripples from the tiny stone.
Your knowledge lights my lamp,
brings me hope. I won’t damp-
en el entusiasmo’s light
Gracias, mi amiga, día y night

(Rhyming words for my poem are from verses 1 and 2 of “The Sound of Silence” by Simon and Garfunkel.)

April 4, 2025 – Oh! The Places You’ll Go with Dave Wooley

often I stay here
delighted with my vacation
spot homestead

April 5, 2025 – Scars with Bryan Ripley Crandall

I hold a handful
of scars—literally.
These ones all
on my left hand–
our old dachshund bit
six-year-old me, thinking
I was our aggressive beagle.
(He felt bad afterwards.)
With high school friends, I
attempted to slice a frozen English
muffin for a late-night snack—
but sliced my thumb instead,
(best to wait for the thawing).
The college sleepover mango-cutting
while working on breakfast
for the late sleepers turned out bad,
lots of blood and even fainting
as I watched the blood pour into the sink.
In seventh grade, I sliced off the knuckle
of my thumb, and as a seventh grade
teacher, I sliced off my
index fingernail–those last two
with an X-Acto knife.

Now, along with age spots
and arthritic knuckles,
the scars are hardly visible.
They have settled in
and found a home
on this valued hand,
a home of mercy and
remembering, a home of
gratitude and love.

April 6, 2025 – Where I’m From, Again! with Stacey Joy 

I am from the post-war boxy and basic stucco, sides splitting with kids who seemed to marry just in time for the next ones

And my first apartment shared with an artist on Clark Avenue

And the windowed beauty with Terry and Christine

And the upstairs apartment where little Mia downstairs always wanted to play

And the hundred-year-old 16th Street house with a mouse and my new husband, who woke the neighbor steaming milk for his lattes

And the little ADU behind Mitch and Joyce’s where we made plum sauce from the best plum tree ever

And the wallpapered horror on Delaware Street in Iowa

And the freezing-water-pipe house on Arizona Avenue in Iowa

And our very first home purchase in Michigan where we planted a ginkgo

And the ranch house with a pool to survive the Phoenix summers

And the house that needed new windows (we realized after we bought it)

And the white-tiled, white-walled flat in Bahrain with dust and the call to prayer

And now, after a lifetime of homes, our little cabin continues daily calling out “home” to us.

April 7, 2025 – Villanelle on the Vine with Erica Johnson

Azaleas

A Villanelle

Take care of yourself for me
Your wounds draw a new start
Grace and nurture for you three

Both to give and receive is key
Good is here to fill your heart
Take care of yourself for me

Building onto the family tree
Is adding your own leafy art
Grace and nurture for you three

What will endure, you will see
On the route, these steps all part
Take care of yourself for me

With gentleness and care, just be
Many dewy dawnings dart
Grace and nurture for you three

Hard things you will not flee
The unnamed you will chart
Take care of yourself for me
Grace and nurture for you three

A whole webpage about azaleas, my favorite spring flower.

#Verselove 2024 – A Week of Poetry 1

Denise Krebs1 Comment

7. Things (Better) Left Unsaid with James Coats

Seattle, 1:04 p.m.

it happened that second
in time, after much pushing
groaning and sweating

the world grew by one
and I knew reality
would never be the same

another life
another personality
our family has grown

the world has grown
then I held you as your
bright eyes gleamed

and I was a new person
a grammy first

6. Photographic Poem with Katrina Morris

Your
Grammy
Holds on, but
Your dimples dance,
Feasting on freedom,
Sipping steep grades, your joy.
Restrain your rapture? Never!
When you summit this stony slant
You’ll keep going, for you carry stars

5. Friday Date Night with Leilya Pietre

We went to that park in Long Beach
With the beautiful walking path around a lake
I thought a break-up was imminent

We walked and then sat looking at the water
And you asked me to marry you
It took me awhile to say, Not yet.

Seven years later, I nestled into your safe yes.

4. Alphabeticals with Jennifer Guyor-Jowett

a’s bobbed tail
b’s oft flip fail
c’s open quote
d’s half note
e’s toothy grin
f’s shelf built in
g’s beckoning
h’s reckoning
i’s reaching
j’s leaching
k’s a kicker
l’s a licker
m’s a mountain
n’s spilled fountain
o’s looking round
p’s feeling proud
q’s dainty
r’s fainty
s’s slither’s slow
t’s a compass rose
u’s embrace
v’s a vase
w’s two vases
x’s holding spaces
y’s the wise owl
z’s zigzag scowl

3. Inspirational Places with Wendy Everard

Pittsburgh’s in Jack Gilbert

As we rode Duquesne Incline,
he already was old and in Berkeley. Steel City
watches over the growing of knowing,
for heirlooms of progeny. But this
morning, the three rivers backdrop
for thunderstorms, Andy Warhol and
the bridges of a city bring light to our
dark, pathways of connections.
To this city we came just to
give our kids a taste of Primati Bros.
(way too much cole slaw),
and the Pirates, and Randyland, a
show of hue saturation and celebration.
His hometown was the
landfall of his view from Paris,
the eye of his childhood, always
new. As each of us have our own past, in city or
country, we are products of our nurturing.
His lifetime weaving carried the thread of his
native city, coloring the world, his poetry with
land-roots of comfort and claiming.

Golden shovel striking line is “As he watches for morning, for the dark to give way and show his landfall, the new country, his native land.” By Jack Gilbert in “Looking at Pittsburgh from Paris”

2. The Magic Box with Bryan Ripley Crandall

List of ten that started this Magic Box poem: a green thumb, “beam me up” travel, lie detector machine, ointment to remove the pain in my right hand, reading and reducing and replacing tsundoku, Colin Kaepernick protest redo, Palestinians having their own homeland again with a good and fair government, connection with others, an organized email with an inbox that gets emptied daily, peace on earth really.

A Redo of Kneeling

My visitor today is a green thumb–
my plants clothed in need
now fed and watered with a hum

The smooth slander spotter,
reviler revealer, lifts
the weight of the world
and clears out the system

Beaming to Pennsylvania on
the wings of hearing,
really hearing you this time,
better beside the blooms,
not a long way from heaven,
not killing time,
but living and breathing freedom

Freedom tastes gentle
It’s never-ending relief
instantaneous sustenance
of hope and release

Transporting success
on the creaking knees of the old
and the knowing knees of the young
A redo please
of a quiet anthem
that hears
listens
and finds
justice

1. #hashtagacrostics with Kim Johnson

#Deliberatelydiligentdiscerner
#Eternallyemergingevolver
#Nonsensicallynaiveniceness
#Inherentlyimprobableindependence
#Solidsecondhandskeptic
#Especiallyeagerentrant

April 5 #Verselove Poetic Drive-bys

Denise Krebs

Poetic Drive-bys with Bryan Ripley Crandall, April 5, 2024

 

A couple of weeks ago I took myself on a listening date and wrote a street poem with all the found things I listened to.  I decided to return to this striking woman I listened to in the thrift store that day.

Hippified you are into your seventies,
taller than most, wiry and wizened,
gray hair half loosely pinned up,
half fallen around your shoulders,
your trusty fuzz-nugget beside you.
You were thrift shopping with the rest of us,
but you stood out a head above others–
both figuratively and literally–
living out loud with passion, pleasure, purpose.
You sincered us with your kindness and joy,
and we were captivated, even entertained–

Just a bit of what you said that day:
Yeah, they’re kind of hard to find.
They go fast.
Where are my gla…
Ok, I do have my glasses.
Yo, dog, let’s go.
I have something for you
{Thank you.}
You’re welcome, you’re so welcome.
It came from my heart.
I don’t know if you like it,
but I like it.
Is that in your way?

Your rarity is a treasure,
not at all in my way.