Choosing Cinquains

I meant to post this yesterday, but life got in the way. After taking a hiatus to be with my grandchildren, I did want to return with at least one final cinquain. I've enjoyed this challenge I set for myself, even though I didn't make it every day of the month. Thanks for following along with me. Happy National Poetry Month!

Christ in the House of Martha and Mary by Johannes Vermeer

Martha's Choice

Martha

fretted over

boiled lamb and stuffed olives,

fumed and muttered while doling bowls

of stew,

complained

that Mary sat

and did nothing to help,

unable to understand how

idle

hands could

please Jesus when

so much depended on

a table filled with bread and wine

for him. 

© Doraine Bennett

Cinquains Interrupted

Cinquains
Interrupted
By jokes with Joseph and
Books with David and games with grand
Children.

Corps of Cinquains 5

The Great Falls in Montana. National Park Service photo, courtesy of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial National Historic Site.

Great Falls

I wished
for the pencil
of masters, that I might
depict the infinite beauty--
these falls.

© Doraine Bennett

Corps of Cinquains 4

Photo from Floyd River Wildlife Complex.

Floyd's River

Buried
Floyd's body on
the bluff. Gave the river
his name. Returned to our boats and
pressed on.

© Doraine Bennett

Allelulia! He Is Risen!

Easter

by Benjamin Alire Sáenz


My mother woke us that Sunday – her voice

a bell proclaiming spring. We rose

diving into our clothes, newly bought.

We took turns standing before mirrors,

combing, staring at our new selves.

Sinless from forty days of desert,

sinless from good confessions, we

drove to church in a red pickup, bright

and red and waxed for the special

occasion. Clean, polished as apples,

the yellow-dressed girls in front

with Mom and Dad; the boys in back,

our hair blowing free in the warming

wind. Winter gone away. At Mass,

the choir singing loud: ragged

notes from ragged angel’s voices;

ancient hymns sung in crooked Latin.

The priest, white robed, raised his palms

toward God, opened his mouth in awe:

“Alleluia!” The unspoken word of Lent

let loose in flight. Alleluia and incense

rising, my mother wiping her tears

from words she’d heard; my brother and I

whispering names of statues lining

the walls of the church. Bells ringing,

Mass ending, we running to the truck,

shiny as shoes going dancing. Dad

driving us to see my grandmother. There,

at her house, I asked about the new word

I’d heard: resurrection. “Death,

death,” she said, her hands moving downward,

“the cross – that is death.” And then she

laughed: “The dead will rise.” Her upturned

palms moved skyward as she spoke. “The dead

will rise.” She moved her hands toward me,

wrapped my face with touches, and

laughed again. The dead will rise.

Corps of Cinquains 3

Black Bird's Grave

Made land

at Black Bird's grave, 

chief slain with four hundred 

of his Omaha nation by

smallpox.

Atop

the hill we watch

the river meander

for miles, distance itself from

such sorrow. 

© Doraine Bennett

Corps of Cinquains 2

Lewis and Clark reenactors on the way to Omaha. Photo from Lewis and Clark Boat House and Nature Center.

The White Pirogue

What new
calamity
comes, what evil genie
sails with the white pirogue on this
journey?

© Doraine Bennett

A Corps of Cinquains

Corps of Discovery

Forty
men, hand-picked, by
two captains navigate
upstream, keelboat, pirogues, canoes
poled or

pulled, towed
against currents,
shifting sandbars, dead tree
snags hidden on river bottoms,
always

heading
north and west to
unknown Pacific shores,
forged by trials, hardened, strong to
the core.

© Doraine Bennett

The Cinquain Erodes

Photo by Mike Neilson, Encyclopedia of Alabama

Water Takes the Mountain

I seep
into the sand-
stone cap, eat through weakened
rock, drip, drive, devour until I
break through

into
the softer shale,
unprotected now. I
ravage its folded anticlines.
The shale

crumples,
sandstone topples
onto the valley floor,
the mountain is mine to plunder
and raze.

© Doraine Bennett

Kon-tiki Cinquain

Kon-tiki at Sea

Kon-tiki

Crossing 

the Pacific

in a balsa-log raft,

one forms a friendly partnership

with sea,

wind, sky.

Ocean waves crash

upon us, run through our 

roped frame, lift us atop the crest

again. 

© Doraine Bennett

Cinquains of Joy

A Psalm of Joy

My frame
will not contain
the joy a mother feels
when her children find their way home
at last.

Answers
to prayers prayed in
silent pain for their pain
seemed so long coming, I asked did
God hear?

And then,
as if He had
stored them up, kept them safe--
babes and answers--until their hearts
could hold

the stars,
moon, sun, answers
came spiraling, entire
galaxies, indisputably
ablaze

and I
am filled with awe,
with wonder, with joy, here
where morning dawns, and evening fades
in song.

© Doraine Bennett

Maize Cinquain

Corn Maze

I have
entered doors that
led to corn mazes too
complicated for peaceful thought,
wondered

why I
took this turn when
another would have led
me home, carried my dreams over
breezy

pathways
immune to pain,
but my route ran counter
to those paths, and I found treasure
buried

among
the stalks of corn
that another might have
missed, and I am richer because
of it.

© Doraine Bennett

Today's Little Ditty has Poetry Friday round-up today.

Nurture

Photo by Graham Crumb

After Naps

She wakes,
nuzzles her curls
against my cheek, fearless,
commanding assurance she is
cherished.

© Doraine Bennett

Stormy Cinquain

Thunderstruck

The storm
will not relent,
rages against the roof,
banging, spitting, screaming for its
own way.

© Doraine Bennett

A Timely Cinquain

When time
runs out and slams
the door like a spoiled child,
there's nothing you can do except
breathe and...

© Doraine Bennett

Found Cinquain

I'm stretching the rules of the cinqauin today. Counting words rather than syllables, and fudging just a bit.

Mary Kingsley lived among the Fang tribe in West Africa, a fierce people known to be cannibals. She traipsed across Africa in a high-collared, long Victorian dress. She firmly believed a respectable woman had "no right to go about in Africa in things you would be ashamed to be seen in at home." She promptly told London feminists that she would rather have "perished on a public scaffold" than be seen in trousers. In fact, her long skirts probably saved her life when she fell into a pit dug by lion hunters. Her dress deflected the spikes intended to wound a captive lion. Mary traveled light and approached the Africans as a trader. The following "found poem" are her thoughts on African public relations.

Portrait of Mary Kingsley, circa 1900.

Mary Kingsley, African Explorer
A Found Cinquain

When you
first appear among people
who have never seen anything like
you before, they naturally regard you as
a devil.

But when
you buy or sell
something with them, they recognize
there is something reasonable and human about you
and that

if you
show yourself
an intelligent trader who knows
the price of things, they treat you
with respect.

© Doraine Bennett

Things One Finds in the Creek

I have chosen to write a cinquain a day for National Poetry Month. I have also been reading Poem Making by Myra Cohn Livingston. She talks about using the dramatic voice in poetry, as opposed to the lyrical voice or the narrative voice. Apostrophe is one form of the dramatic voice. In it the poet addresses something that cannot answer. Livingston says that this voice is best used for "wondering, asking questions, or giving a bit of advice!" So I thought I would make my cinquain for the day an apostrophe.

There is a lovely creek in my backyard, and when it rains, strange and wonderful things float downstream to be caught on the rocks that span the water. After a recent three-day deluge, we spotted what looked like a door on the far bank. Once the creek went down enough to cross over, we discovered it wasn't a door at all. It was a piano keyboard! I've been pondering that keyboard for a few weeks now. It seemed the perfect subject for my apostrophe.

Cinquain for a Broken Piano

Someone
once pounded your keys,
played "Hey, Jude" or a Bach
prelude. Maybe they crooned a melody
composed

for one
beautiful face
too haunting to forget.
But who dismantled you and cast
your bed

of keys
into the creek
somewhere upstream to drift
down to the rocks behind my house,
leave me

to grieve
the unfinished
song, wonder what note came
next,  and why your hammered strings are
silent?

© Doraine Bennett

Desert Cinquain

Today is Poetry Friday and Amy hosts the roundup at The Poem Farm. Stop by and enjoy all the exciting stops for this first Friday of National Poetry Month. My goal for the month is to write a cinquain each day. Here is the next installment.

Photo by Winfried Bruenken

Kalahari Crossing

Nattered
by tsetse flies,
plagued by malaria,
bedeviled by hunger and thirst,
I sit

beneath
my small shade and
wait, bone-weary, wasting,
as a tyrant sun strolls across
the sky.

© Doraine Bennett

Photo by Charles J. Sharp

Xanadu Cinquain

Xanadu drawn by Patten Wilson for a hardcover edition of Coleridge's poetry by Longmans Green, London, in 1898.



Dinner at Xanadu

He lifts
his glass, musicians
play, six thousand guests bow
their knees while the magnificent
Khan drinks.

© Doraine Bennett

Cinquain for Stanley and Livingstone

"Recontre de Livingstone," from the French translation of 

How I Found Livingstone by Henry Morton Stanley, 1876

Stanley Remembers

It was

a foolish way

to greet the man I sought

across half the dark continent.

When I

wanted 

to dance and shout,

instead in quiet awe

I said, "Doctor Livingstone, I

presume."

Afraid

he would reject

any jubilation,

I hid in the formality

of words.

© Doraine Bennett

National Poetry Month

There is so much going on in the Kidslitosphere this month. Fortunately the delicious Jama Rattigan is keeping up with it all. So stop over at Jama's Alphabet Soup to explore all the poetic possibilities.

I have been an armchair poet the last few Aprils, not fully trusting myself to make a commitment to post a poem every single day of the month. But this year, I've decided to dive in. As I have explored poetry forms lately, I found myself enjoying the very simple cinquain and all the possibilities it holds. See this post for a lovely example from Myra Cohn Livingston.

I'm going to be kind to myself if I don't manage to get one written every single day, but I'm trying not to leave myself too much wiggle room either! So let's get started with my first cinquain of the month.

Rules 

Five lines
carry the thought,
counting syllables--two,
four, six, eight, two--creating one
cinquain.

© Doraine Bennett