Easy is Alone (rewrite of “What is Easy and What is Not”) November 2, 2009
Posted by lisadalrymple in Second Draft Poetry.Tags: Easy is Alone, poetry blog, second draft poem
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Easy is alone
like a floosy
in the moon
Talk in peeking
me’s and balked
eyes speaking
Meet in circle
Curved parapet of
ward, feeble
Crawl through window
The sky is small
Fear too, below
Moon is whitewash,
a resigned gloom
Midnight’s gloss
dulls soon.
Quarantine by Eavan Boland October 19, 2009
Posted by lisadalrymple in Inspired Poetry.Tags: Eavan Boland, Inspired Poetry, poetry blog, Quarantine
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“Quarantine”
Eavan Boland
In the worst hour of the worst season
of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
He was walking – they were both walking – north.
She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and west and north.
Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.
In the morning they were both found dead.
Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.
Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:
Their death together in the winter of 1847.
Also what they suffered. How they lived.
And what there is between a man and woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved.
Tesselate (Do I Not Belong) October 14, 2009
Posted by lisadalrymple in First Draft Poems.Tags: first draft poem, poetry blog, Tesselate (Do I Not Belong)
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A good friend likened me to a diamond behind glass
Something shimmering below lamp light
Something to be looked at with longing
Something only to be bought by a deserving hand
Strong hands that can afford such luxuries
If mine is a diamond heart, a vessel
Formed time after time and the hardest,
Who am I to say who is mine
Do I not belong to the earth
If I am a thousand small panes
Of light, in all directions
Do I not belong everywhere
Carrots October 14, 2009
Posted by lisadalrymple in First Draft Poems.Tags: Carrots, first draft poem, poetry blog
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I.
I imagine that if the earth was an edible object, it would taste something like a baby carrot.
“Here,” I said, handing him a stumpy orange vegetable. “Eat this carrot. Doesn’t it taste like the whole world?” But what I was really asking was: “Am I not a woman, grown from the ground, ready for picking and packing and shipping to the table that is your heart?”
II.
As a young girl, my mother asked me to peel adult carrots for stews and roasts. I always imagined that they were legs of women being shaven. I meticulously transformed the rough hewn dirt strewn surface of the carrots to smooth and beautiful carrot women legs.
For roasts I would cut them three times, about the size of baby carrots. I suppose if it weren’t for the knife, they’d be grateful for a chance to return to their girlhood.
Stews were more painful. Stews resulted in 10 to 15 pieces of carrot leg, tossed in handfuls of boiling water. The legs of carrot women fear stews worse than existence.
I used to think that my hands were too rough, too like a man’s. The tips of my fingers parch and I pick at dead skin like peeling carrots. Until beneath the shield of band-aids my thumb tips were revealed with blood-pink.
III.
I cannot stop breathing. I do not swim in stews. I am not a thing to be roasted. I am a raw thing of the earth that came from darkness to find itself a unique color, a woman in the peel-back.
Wicked Blood, a song by Sea Wolf October 10, 2009
Posted by lisadalrymple in Song Lyrics.Tags: poetry blog, Sea Wolf, Song Lyrics, Wicked Blood
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I’ve never posted song lyrics on here, but I was so so inspired by this song:
We met in the east
Poured in like a flood
You’re the whispering kind
Dark sapphire blood
You’re a vision of veils
All shimmery white
Like a backdrop of sails
All aglow from the light
Of the wonder behind
At a starry night
In the mountain’s song
In the blue jay’s call
My heartbeat flows
In crystal water falls
You were so beautiful
In your elegant bed
You’d have my blues
For your Nantucket reds
I’d wait in the dark
Balanced on a thread
So I’d wait in the dark
Balanced on this thread
And under the church-light
You stand there
With your wicked blood and your curls
Yeah, under the church-light
You stand there
In your fur and your pearls
These lines were here
Long before we came around
Yeah, these lines were here
And there’s an ember in the rafters
And it’s going to bring this whole thing down
In the neon mist
I heard you breathe
An exquisite sound
Some secret symphony
Your silken skin
My fingers rough
In the midnight dim
We went home and touched
Beneath the chandeliers
And your Persian’s dust
Beneath your chandeliers
And your Persian’s dust
And under the church-light
You stand there
With your wicked blood and your curls
Yeah, under the church-light
You stand there
In your fur and your pearls
These lines were here
Long before we came around
Yeah, these lines were here
And there’s an ember in the rafters
And it’s going to bring this whole thing down
Click here to visit Sea Wolf’s MySpace page and listen to the song
Untitled and not quite finished… October 7, 2009
Posted by lisadalrymple in First Draft Poems.Tags: first draft poem, poetry blog, untitled, Voodoo and Clay
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I would like to mold you
All voodoo and clay
Shape you into the man
I’d like to keep holding
Through a cloudless night
Sculpted, parallel to sea
I would like to scoop up
Your tears with a spoon
And let the drops tumble
Over your parched soul
Drink in your fears
And drown them, man
The Hangman by Margaret Atwood October 7, 2009
Posted by lisadalrymple in Inspired Poetry.Tags: Hangman, Inspired Poetry, Margaret Atwood, poetry blog
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Click here to read this fascinating poem.
If I could write longer poems, it would hopefully be something like this. 
Ceilings September 29, 2009
Posted by lisadalrymple in First Draft Poems.Tags: Ceilings, first draft poem, poetry blog
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How many ceilings have I peered
up at all my life
white panes of horizontal
wall stretched out housing
me, my body at various stages
in life sprawled on beds
with peach and lavender bed
spreads eyeing ceilings with vague
wonder, never truly comprehending
their weight.
Virginia is For Lovers- the start of two new poems September 23, 2009
Posted by lisadalrymple in First Draft Poems.Tags: first draft poem, poetry blog, Virginia is for Lovers
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1. First one I started to write:
Virginia is for lovers
Like weed killer is for weeds
A readily available toxic remedy
For a growing green problem
2. The poem I WANTED to write, and it turned out interestingly:
Virginia is for lovers
Lovers who collect other lovers
Like leaves collect themselves on autumn grounds
Sloshed through and rake spindles
Like fingernails down a back
If I can scratch you deeply enough
I know I will touch soil
Fresh and loose, the imprints
Like hundreds of roads
I will trace a message in this earth
And you will try to guess what I’m telling you
And the days will still spin
And the leaves consumed by you and me
Will parch in our stomachs
And crumble to dust and seed
And letters will spill out of us like spring time
We will collect each other
If it is I that tumbled here
If I am a leaf paused on this bit of rock and root
Will I peer up, all hazel and green
To see you floating down upon me
Like watching your hand cover mine
Like taking each other one finger at time
