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 Poems for years 4 and 5 of the Promptly Poetry Challenge. |
| A year's worth of poems, every week for 52 weeks, spanning 2023 and 2024, plus the year following, from August 2024 to August 2025.(provided I live that long, of course). |
  Darkness at Noon “La Dolce Vita” proclaims the sign a voice in protest against the lowering sky the gathering clouds of ill intent and the steps leading downward ever downward into gloom and deep despair far indeed from any sweetness of life the narrow alley squeezed between buildings grown too tall for their ambitions and painted in colours once bright but now dark with age and wear so rarely sunlit in these latter days as though life itself drains slowly fitfully down the grate in the foreground. The sign creaks in the breeze. Line count: 14 Free verse For Promptly Poetry Challenge, Week 35 Prompt: As per illustration. |
| The Seasons The seasons being the template of so many things in life, the daily round eternal bringing echoes of the the dawn till brightest noonday sun, to be followed by the evening shade with darkest midnight promised, so winter speaks of that misty, dreamlike place, our home, mysterious land of formative, forgotten phantoms from which emerge the first beginnings of the person we are meant to be, growing into the one we know as me. And spring is like those years we find when awareness blooms in full, our arms embracing all that comes enticing within our reach and clear eyes lead plans and schemes of all that can be grasped in reaching what we choose to call maturity. The summer comes with certainty, in greatest confidence, completed child and basking in the heat of summer’s bounty, with life burgeoning with positive assurance, no thought of year’s end, the longest days deceiving. Then the fall in so many ways, as autumn spreads its cloak of golden times as rewards for work, now slower pace invading, the dying leaves reminders all that nothing lasts forever and celebrations muted now in shortened days. Return to winter and those colder times, the bones are aching, breath frosted with the waiting knowledge that life grows thin, the wasted body struggling now, indecision ruling thought, and so, at last, it’s over. Line count: 24 Free verse For Promptly Poetry Challenge, week 34 Prompt: Use the following words in your poem: Winter, Spring, Summer, Autumn. |
| Mysteries of the Night From the black emptiness of the darkened window comes the sound that freezes the soul, a shriek of such anguish and sorrow that the listener, no longer safe and ensconced, curls up in the bed with dread and fear, while nightmares toy with the thoughts riding upon the echoes of that tortured cry and questions arise from the deep. Is it the wail of a lost child, hungry and far from home? The scream of a wandering banshee wrenched from a heart of stone? The shade of a long dead traveller set upon by brigands? A last hopeless call for aid from some soul entrapped in the night? No, that sound that haunts your dreams ever after is but the hunting call of the fox. Line count: 14 Free verse For Promptly Poetry Challenge, Week 33 2025 Prompt: Use this title for this weeks poem: Mysteries of the Night. |
 Musicals In a field of crowding buttercups shuttered against the rain she floats like Mary Poppins forgot the plain in Spain. For though the hills may rise and sing her favourite things go spare and carousels go spinning round so fair and unaware. They say the music man was here umbrella to the fore he danced a lot like Oliver and then went off to war. Perhaps I speak of simpler times I’ve lost them all somehow and now our technicolor casts took long ago their bow. Line count: 16 Rhymed abcb For Promptly Poetry Challenge, Week 31 2025 Prompt: As per illustration. |
| Anticipation of Spring Now winter’s snows are shrinking, lace doilies on the lawn, and dark mornings chased away by quickening of the dawn. Now the biting teeth of cold is blunted by the sun and birdsong wakes the swaddled form to hope that winter’s done. Now the mind turns tentative, the lengthened days to count, until the time we say assured we’re over winter’s mount! Line count: 12 Rhymed abcb For Promptly Poetry Challenge, Week 30 2025 Prompt: The anticipation of spring. |
| Ode to February Self effacing, oh Feb, you stand, smallest of the great monthly band, content with the standard weeks four and rarely demand a day more. Though firmly in winter’s cold camp, there’s hope in your briefest of stamps, you might threaten a terrible freeze, but with coming of spring you still tease. Cold and grey as you so often are, there’s good reason to make you a star, while others take forever to run, one blink and February’s done! Line count: 12 Rhymed aabb For Promptly Poetry Challenge, Week 29 2025 Prompt: Use this title for your poem - Ode to February. |
Poetry 4 Poetry when singing has form bringing a certain even moiety. Perhaps music is gained though truth constrained emotion trained drained. Line count: 8 Form: Quadrette - First four lines word count: 1-2-3-4, first four lines rhyme scheme a-b-b-a, second four lines word count: 4-3-2-1, second four lines rhyme scheme: c-d-d-c For Promptly Poetry Challenge, Week 28 Prompt: Write a quadrette. |
| Love Shall I compare love to a string of plastic hearts, to a symbol that means anything from lust to martyred sacrifice upon a ritual conflagration, a popular song composed in the fetid heat of some darkened and dishevelled nightclub, a bright young thing gamboling in spring through fields of green and sunlit daisies, a cherished secret hidden beneath the covers of a bedsit flat high up in the towers of the city, a drunken wedding feast lit with flashbulbs and the shrieks of champagne sozzled mirth, a superhero swooping to save from dragons the striking siren of seventeen summers, and daytime dream of dubious darling daughters? No, I’ll turn to your familiar face and knowing look, then smile in our completeness. Line count: 16 Free verse For Promptly Poetry Challenge, Week 27 2025 Prompt: Illustration of hearts hanging from the letters of the word love. |
| Nightshift I have seen the nightshift those pale creatures hurrying home before the sun seeking the dark to earn their crust and passing the daylight hours in thickly curtained rooms dozing from fitful dream to dream propping up civilisation with quiet unseen labour leaving the day to louder men who dream of other worlds. I have been the nightshift and hated it missing the sunshine and the prattling crowds somehow surviving the regulation two weeks to return exhausted to the day and meaningless toil. Yes I know the nightshift and give them due honour for they hand on the baton without complaint. Line count: 23 Free verse For Promptly Poetry Challenge, Week 26 2025 Prompt: Poet’s choice. |
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