June Poetry Challenge: Beginnings and Endings

[Angeline]

Surprise! I'll be a guest challenge leader for June. This challenge prompts you to write a poem about a beginning or an ending. What might that be? Use your imagination. You could write about a day, an event, a relationship, feeling, anything that focuses on either the start or the end of something. Of course if you're feeling frisky you could write multiple poems, at least one about a beginning and one about an ending. No limits: you can write as many poems as you want.

Poem length, style, erotic or not is your choice, just find a way to make it clear in your poem(s) that you're writing about the start or the end of something.

Here are a few sample poems to give you the general idea and maybe help jump start your muse. There are many other fine poems on the subjects a quick search away.

Beginnings

The Good-Morrow by John Donne

Black Stone on a White Stone by Cesar Vallejo

Beginning by James Wright

Endings

Nothing Gold Can Stay by Robert Frost

Poem With Two Endings by Jane Hirshfield

When You Are Old by William Butler Yeats (Ok maybe this last one isn't *just* about endings but it's possibly my favorite poem ever, so it's on the list! )

Note that this thread is for poems only. If you have comments please post them in the General Commentary Thread.

 

[29wordsforsnow]

Sillies first

I'd say with earth-shattering passion
big bangs came out of fashion
a pretty long time ago
you might say so
right from the start
that's why now
turn up the moans slow
better save the best for last
at least, if you're not one of the fast​

 

[AlinaX]

I begin with the end
my lips following the bend
to the start of the art
of breathlessness...
... a temporary loss
to win - with a finish

 

[Ambient4190]

early arise
follow my
morning routine

apply make-up
fix my hair

but this is
for me
you see

beginning of
a day off

my foot
will not
step beyond
the door

t-shirt panties
all day
welcome welcome
to my insanity

 

[42Below]

It rained in Florence

Your face is the sun
You place its golden coin

In my broken body
My engine is in parts

In your pink shaded mantle
Oil spills across my canvas

to melt the pure wool of winter
from my wind leathered sinew

the lean bone of winter
perennial as your sacrifice

I am at once your
Flamen and Flaminica

singing to the fecundity of life
singing with your husband

The Wind. In Florence
you are A Titian

Flōra forever.
Leaves turned into spring

 

[Shady_nz]

Sunrise, the beginning of a new day
The song of morning birds as they greet the day
Make my heart sing along
Yawning, I stand at the window watching you as you leave

Your shoulders hunch deep into the warmth of your coat
As you walk to your car
You turn and blow me a kiss, the mist of your breath curling like smoke in the air

Turning back to the bed, with its rumpled sheets still warm from our sleep
I snuggle under the covers that still smell of you and our love
Touching the intimate places that you made your own
Still ache in a beautiful way

Sunset, the end of a perfect day
Street lights flicker on in the growing dusk
I wait for you to return, anxious as the hours creep by
A knock at the door startles me and when I answer it
My whole world ends

 

[42Below]

A mind is a body

A body is a pool of water
in a compression of time
between shifting shapes

The body grows a mind
Somersaults underwater
A mermaid is glimmering

She must always be a real
strong swimmer Kick out
her legs and toes pointed

in the anchoring love of a
Self as Self realization of
her liquid body swimming

where Rainbows form Out
over the ocean After rain
a mind is a body of water.

 

[Angeline]

Time Piece

Measure a construct invested in clocks
our human invention, a year or week.
Do you think some Supreme God watches, mocks

our human invention, a year or week
while simply Being, ignoring the fray
of hive-like madness, of dreams where we seek

while simply being, ignoring the fray?
Begin or end the unceasing pursuit
of more or less minutes, of one more day.

Begin or end the unceasing pursuit,
striving, arriving somewhere more or less
scheduled to a fault. Where's the absolute

striving, arriving somewhere more or less,
stumbling through life's space while wedded to time,
starting or ending? It's anyone's guess:

it's anyone's mess or vision sublime.
Measure a construct invested in clocks,
stumbling through life's space while wedded to time.
Measure a construct invested in clocks.

 

[Shady_nz]

Time is a fickle thing
Infinite and linear
Marking beginnings
Ending never

Flying fast in pleasant times
Looping around
Impossible to fathom
Extraordinarily complicated
Stopping a heart beat

 

[positiveflirt]

“If at first you don't succeed..?”
“Try! Try! Try again!”
We shout back to the teacher in unison,
Ready to start out in the world
And to kick anonymous challenges into submission no matter what.
Two times; three times; four.

Yet the mantra doesn't tell you what to do
On the tenth attempt (or is it eleven?),
Sat stranded years later on a country road at the edge a forest
Because the love of your life lied to you about the bus timetable
And now the night is coming, and a bus is not.

She is endless positivity and not apologetic,
And when headlights finally round the corner
I brush away another mosquito
(Looking almost as hungry as I am)
And, pausing, about to throw our bags onto the inviting back seat,
I choose between a beginning and an end once more.

Success, I tell myself sometimes, is not always all it's cracked up to be.

 

[XCelesteX]

Beginning / Ending

My lips around the
firm encasement of
your cock in jeans:

My breath hot against
the fabric's weft,
I greet you again
through the denim.

 

[Lyricalli]

In polite company, perhaps
I'll confess to being a little tired
it's easily understood

Deeper dwells unspoken truth
that I'm too wrung out
for coherence
lying in a puddle
of all my would-be words
that ripple with something like grief
but you're not gone

Yet

Though I feel the fading
of you/not you
how your skin is different
under my fingertips
and tightening my grip
would be trying to grab water
in a fist

Slow goodbyes, they say
are an opportunity for closure

Reality tells me it's always just pain
either way

 

[42Below]

There is a room in a lake
where we fished for
the thing we couldn’t say

We placed a door with a lock
where the sun ever shined
on the frescoes of our lives

In autumn’s falling cloak
we paid the price
of our love

Still there is something
we will never have to say
to each other.

 

[Tzara]

Obituary

A narrow column of few words,
topped by a blurry photograph
of a much younger man. Nothing
unusual in the accompanying text—
parents' names, a few odd dates,
his fondness for fishing or football.
Descendants, if any. The bereaved
widow. Remembrances can be sent…
Perhaps an old friend will notice
and regret how long it's been,
and think about someone else he
misses at odd hours of the night.
Or perhaps he'll shake his head
and turn to the crossword instead.

 

[Ashesh9]

How did the Universe begin?
Was it a hydrogen ion explodin'?
Was it Sir Fred Hoyle's Big Bang?
With a multi dimensional CLAAANG??
Was it Albert's Bose-Einstein God Particle?
Was it Dark Energy expanding in limitless cycle???

 

[29wordsforsnow]

Toe-dipping ends

Before the very end
our worlds collided
chips of crumbling
dust off the facade
painted on the years
we said goodbye love
and so we fell apart
with much comment



that's where the ending started,
not on who said I love you more
but who stopped saying so first
and suddenly fingernails dug in
maybe to save us from drowning



or drawing lines to remember
furrows of borrowed sorrow
here we hurt forever and a day
every furthest corner of Earth
12.500 miles too close



only deep down
under the surface
we escaped to
different oceans
of tears and sobs
to find the scars
rapidly growing
their own new life

 

[XMarilynX]

The end of your bees in
the freedom of my birds.

There is a Mammoth quiet
in this room. You sit framed
across the silence in my
screwball whiskey & coke.
Your framed lamp lit face a
stilled book. I read in between
the lines through my whiskies
prisms. In vital memories
my rationality you unbuttoned
in our inequality. We were locked
and opposite. Inexhaustibly I was
a lawn to be filled by your weeds.
My karma a welcoming sign in a
body for the binary minds of your
dead bees. I cry that I could not
tell you in my stoned poems how
I your daughter felt trapped in
your binary archive.