CURATION | COLLECTION | POETRY | PROMPTS | 30-DAY CHALLENGES
A Spiritual Journey Through Poetic Pupa
Volume 4 of my stories featuring diversity in responses to Diana C.’s 30-day poetry challenge
Diana challenged us with 30-days of issued-all-at-once-prompts.
Day 4: Journey of undoing, being and becoming
I chose day-4 for my 4th volume because this piece by Kim McKinney hit my feed in the feature spot this morning:
These lines particularly resonated with my description of myself as a “deep thinker” and “explorer of ideas and the mind.” I hope you hit the link and read the entire piece, which also inspired my choice of image and the title of this collection, as a pupa is another name for a chrysalis or a cocoon:
My new profession is explorer, Of all the good things, places, and people, The causes that matter, The time to read a book.
…
God speaks sometimes, And others think it is to break us, But we realize the time has come For another grand metamorphosis.
Kim’s entry led me to Jupiter Grant’s
which, I write with tingly glee, is a tanka! Why does that excite me so? Because as I responded to Sahil Patel’s day-2 prompt in his being-issued-serially 30-day challenge
and I wrote tanka for each and every one of Diana’s 30 prompts. Here is my day 4 entry:
Heart and mind shatter Lose identity rebuild Embody mind soul Greg Gregorious Marcus Soul expanding Unity
Carolyn F. Chryst, Ph.D.’s wonderful entry
Silvia Poldaru, MA explains her two-connected-haiku entry for us, and I applaud her for including a poesplanation/decoder ring:
The time in between is all about doing and undoing, being, becoming and unbecoming. It is in the being we find the bits that we want to undo. In our brokenness, we thread up the pieces and become something else until we’re undone again.
Silvia, if you have not already done so, try tanka — I think you will love how it is almost like two haiku in one.
I also love the threaded connection between Sivia’s and Jupiter’s pieces.
Alice Floris also creates a brief piece with a deep decoder:
When it comes to art, writing or any other creative expression, the best thing you can do is not to have a clue what you want the result to be, because if you do, the idea often goes beyond perfection that it stops you from creating anything at all….You sometimes need madness and messiness to create something unique and beautiful.
Hooray, I found another tanka, this one of the 31 syllables in a single line variety by Lennie Varvarides
Lennie, you may or may not realize that the single line structure is the most traditional form of tanka. I like to use it to enhance evoking connection and/or when the 5 line structure unduly restricts the best word choices.
Here’s one of 6 tanka I wrote on unconditional love:
Unconditional love rare on Earth ruled by egos and attachments from which awake souls should detach with not suffer from love
This single line tanka stands for that despite what Joe Walsh sings in this fabulous song
death, not life, is the illusion:
Exit-date illusion souls do not dissipate still leaving all-too-real for somnambulists yet waking won’t salve grieving hearts
Now, back to our features, with this one from Francesca Dallaglio about how we all rise like Phoenix’s when we realize that imploding and rebuilding is far more effective than renovating:
OK, let’s see if I can find any entries outside of KTHT besides this very impressive and visually striking Fibonacci poem from Joseph Lieungh, and I speak not of the feature image but of the shape of the poem itself:
Yay, successful search — my friend Stuart Englander wrote:
and lo and behold Tree tanka’d:
which connects so nicely that I get to end on a high note to connect dots and feature my musetee’s Esther George’s recent piece from outside of the challenge. This one in ILLUMINATION:
and this one in Diana’s Know Thyself, Heal Thyself:
Here are the three previous volumes:
Borrowing Stuart’s tags of poets: Claire Kelly Noorain Hassan, BMS Liam Ireland Agnes Laurens Dr Preeti Singh Josh Balerite Acol Lucy Dan 蛋小姐 (she/her/她) Joe Luca Desiree Driesenaar James G Brennan Terry Trueman Michael Burg, MD (AKA Medium Michael Burg) Terry Mansfield
If any of you had a day 4 entry, please leave a link in the comments so that our readers can enjoy them.
In Rama I create,