Same Title Challenge

[wildsweetone]

seems like one hasn't been thrown out there for a couple of months, so...


Same Title Challenge

title: Change​

form: open​

length: open​

time limit: open​

expectation:
(i) write one, critique two (you are only allowed to suggest one improvement for each of the two poems you critique)​

(ii) post your poems in this thread.​

happy writing! i can't wait to read your poetry.

 

[Angeline]

Two bits and the dollar's gone,
two months and autumn's brilliance
drains away to winter's gray. Two
weeks and the first crocus will
open its eye, blink a patch of purple
through the ice. Two years then
two more I've been gone. My children
are grown, my daughter is me two
decades ago. Two sisters then one,
two parents then one. Two strangers
chance upon a poem, lift their lives
from the narrow margins of loneliness
and weave hope together. Starlight
starbright two wishes today, tomorrow.

 

[Liar]

Change

Her Majesty gave me an
engraved glare before
I flipped her over and
ran a thoughtful fingertip
across that delicate coat
of arms,

and a callous copper alloy
whispering of meager value.

Her jagged symmetry slipped
between my fingers, and I
didn't even flinch before
I let her fall to rattle
in an empty paper cup.

She would be someone else's
now, maybe passed from
hand to hand before the
night was over, bartered
for the smallest need,

maybe left to fall forgotten
to the asphalt, trampled
by those like me, who could
not bother looking down.

Maybe salvaged and treasured
by a child. Maybe not.

 

[Eluard]

Change

The star hits that buried wheel in space
and begins to break up, slowly,
dissolving into napalm on children
and tongues of plasma that overtake
the lonely and the dying,
and somewhere, at some time,
the muzzle flash of a bullet
that is fired into a brain.
It is change the boiling lake whispers
And keeps the sword hidden.

The hero is babbling now
and prophesying at the lakeside
of all those who will die
if he, he alone, does not save them —
but the star has sown deafness
in advance of its fall.
This is all that is needed for change
to overcome the world.
The hero loses his way
back to the fire that is right before him.


---------------

 

[champagne1982]

on making Change

Take a whole, use part of it,
make change.

Is it something new, better
or less than it was?

Out of loss comes more.
From failure comes success.
Change creates difference.

 

[wildsweetone]

wow we're off to a great start already! i better spend some time over the weekend on one for me.

 

[unpredictablebijou]

Change


Oh it is not
it is not so
different as all that; it is only that
that face didn't know
what this face knows now.

(to have been at one time
beautiful, for just a year or two
between awkwardness and age
to have been fierce, and happy)

cameras did not worry me once
but now my face
is full of ghosts

it is a different happiness that shows
a careful, educated peace
skeptical of itself
and rounded like a stone
by the tumbling of grief over rough grief

- it's nothing, it's nothing, hardly a difference
but then again a thousand years have passed
and every moment shows

if there had been no pictures until now
I would still think it beautiful
but now I understand the grinning skull
the bone beneath the sweet
and knowing these things
drags the mouth, the eyes
slowly,
down.