As the time nears for Post-It Note Poetry 2024 (beginning on February 1st), I like to take time and look back over the poems I wrote for the online poetry challenge in 2023.
2023's poetry was fueled by my imagination starting to link together haiku about topics that just popped in my head out of nowhere (the muses are always speaking to me). I began writing linked verse poetry in three stanzas of haiku or senryu about any subject that entered my weird-ass brain and I called them "3 Ways of Looking at ...". These became favorites of readers, so I have planned even more of them, and have written a few more since then, hoping to get enough out of the pool of inspriation, the echoes of the ether, to eventually create a book of them.
2023's Post-it-Note adventure also saw me paying homages to my favorite creatures on earth, the birds. Especially the birds I feel a connection to: mockingbirds, crow, and catbirds. I will continue this trend as well. I also wrote about butterflies and in 2024 I would like to write a "3 Way" poem about moths. Maybe dragonflies and beetles too (I do have a firefly one written).
Here are some of my personal favorites and some of the favorites of readers and participants in the poetry challenge.
3 Ways of Looking at a UFO (Disinformation Age) is one of my personal favorites. It's my wake-up call to all the people out there (too many) who don't know enough about this topic and are therefore too easiliy led astray by powerful people trying to keep the secret of zero-point energy. Just look that up. It's a rabbit hole that has been boarded up by people who continue to rake in billions by vampirically sucking the life blood of mother Earth when we haven't needed oil, gas, or electric grids for decades. LSS: If ETs were a threat we would not be here now given what we (our militaries) have done to them over and over again when they do come. I pulled a 1940s document off the FBI website, buried deep within the pages of a document just called vaguely UFO-1 where a (redacted name) professor had contact with ETs and stated in his first bullet point: "They are peaceful." Does that mean all of them are? No. But I believe (and others) that the ones space traveling and visiting ARE peaceful. And the whole issue and topic of the poem is "humans are not peaceful." Yet. But we will be. And ain't it time we got started on that?
Okay.... So if you're still reading after the UFO poem, great! Glad to have you with me on my roller coaster of weirdness. A reader favorite last year is 3 Ways of Looking at a Butterfly Collection. This one came to me as I was looking for inspiration images for a short fiction piece I'm writing called A Lepidoptery for Leon. Some of the images I was looking at were very brilliant and it was hard for me to grasp that the poor things were dead...they still looked so alive! So my brain assembled this poem where they fly through their captive frames to freedom!
Well, when I started writing the 3 Ways of Looking poems, I knew that sooner or later I would be called to write one about my major and first spirit guide. I am connected deeply with crows and have written a lot of poetry about them.
You might think it is easy for someone living in Florida to write a poem about winter and snow when I don't have to deal with it. It is. Partly because I miss seeing it. Something about that first snowfall is magical. It is. And I miss being the childhood of snow angels and catching flakes on your tongue and riding down a snowbank in a cardboard box with no brakes (Blizzard of '78) and walking to the creek to peek through a hole in a tree and see a sleeping field mouse. The world sleeps and that is just as necessary and beautiful as the world waking up and coming alive again in the spring.
Last, but not least in the slightest, is my haiku paying respect to one of my favorite birds. These shy birds always make themselves known to me when I am out walking in nature. They are only in my area for the winter, but they are some of my dearest friends and make Florida winters pleasant. It is easier to take walks when it is cooler outside, plus...CATBIRDS! A tip on seeing them is that they often eat on the ground so look for them in low bushes, etc.
This concludes my look back at last year's Post-It Note poems. I will write another "looking back at poetry challenges" post in March, just before the launch of National Poetry Month.
Until then —
Live long and prosper...oh, and also write and/or read some poetry!