This week let’s celebrate Louise Glück winning the Nobel Prize in Literature by using one of her poems as a prompt. I must admit that while I recognized her name, I didn’t know much of her work before last week so if you’ve got a favorite poem of hers, use that, otherwise may I suggest:
This is the moment when you see again
the red berries of the mountain ash
and in the dark sky
the birds’ night migrations.
It grieves me to think
the dead won’t see them—
these things we depend on,
they disappear.
What will the soul do for solace then?
I tell myself maybe it won’t need
these pleasures anymore;
maybe just not being is simply enough,
hard as that is to imagine.
Living Poetry 
The HOA likes to think
it controls all things
mandating the shape and form
within it’s parochial influence
And so it has declared war
on the old Elaeagnus at the front of the neighborhood
Once shaggy and unkempt
Fourteen feet high and queen of this land
Planted before houses sprouted up
like onion grass in the Spring
or mushrooms after a rain
the lone legacy of a tobacco farmer’s wife
long since gone
first to coast and then below it
Three years ago they ripped it out of the ground
Two years ago they poisoned the roots
Last year they banned it
an example of our hubris
Now, with the first cool breezes of the fall
evaporating a summer’s worth of sweat
leaves (only dry yellow and brown) swirl
and the sweet fragrance of the queen’s illicit flowers
scents the imperative of living things in their time
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Posted by Chris Clarke | October 15, 2020, 10:30 AMNice elegy for a shrub. I love the “houses sprouted up like onion grass” bit. Good work!
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Posted by Bartholomew Barker | October 15, 2020, 5:32 PMI find this most intriguing. Read over and again. Nice work.
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Posted by Lisa Tomey | October 16, 2020, 8:25 PM(is there a way to edit posts after you post it? I ** always ** find typos or dropped articles…)
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Posted by Chris Clarke | October 15, 2020, 10:36 AMThere’s probably a way but don’t worry about it. We’re just expecting first drafts here.
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Posted by Bartholomew Barker | October 15, 2020, 5:34 PMA quiet, sweet soul
Left his riverside cabin
Motoring to the banks
With a side trip
To the ICU
Now the boat is engraved
A side panel of his urn
A final resting place
And now his soul
Well
Maybe skims the waters
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Posted by Lisa Tomey | October 16, 2020, 8:32 PMVery nice.
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Posted by Bartholomew Barker | October 16, 2020, 9:05 PMThank you. It’s based on a recent loss of a kind soul.
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Posted by Lisa Tomey | October 23, 2020, 3:01 AM