elfchen

 "Elfchen"

Greeting, poetry players! I'm joining with the Poetry Sisters today in their hijinks with the German poetry form which you *could* call an "elevenie," but why would you when you could call it an "elfchen"?

The form (German Elf "eleven" and -chen as a diminutive suffix to indicate diminutive size and endearment) is a short poem with a given pattern.

I am immediately charmed and challenged by this form, because "What do you mean?" but also because in German "elf" means eleven, yes, but when capitalized (Elf), also elf! So to me there is no choice but to write them playfully mischievously.

I hope I succeed a few times here...I'm going with semistandard punctuation, and I think the first word serves as title in these. The first one's from an extended verse narrative I'm working on.

 

coffee

steams darkly

in Mom’s cup:

nose intrigued but tongue

revolts

lobe

hangin' out,

a blank slate

just waiting for adornment:

purpose!

match

lies lightly–

feisty little hothead

craving our casual strike–

ignites

Thanks to the Poetry Sisters for letting us all play along! Watch their Elfchens cavort at the locations below, and I'm wishing our host, Michelle at MoreArt4All, and all of YOU a playful and mischievous end to 2023, in the knowledge that a little joy can keep us going even when the world's pretty dark.

Liz @ Liz Garton Scanlon
Tricia @ The Miss Rumphius Effect
Tanita @ {fiction, instead of lies}
Laura @ Laura Purdie Salas
Sara @ Read Write Believe
Kelly @ Kelly Ramsdell

COPout28

Howdy, Poetry Friends!

Busy time here, just as by you, I'm sure--so I just have time to offer a couple of links so you can, if you choose, get a perspective on what went down at the largest climate negotiation ever, COP28.

I trust scientist & communicator Katharine Hayhoe to tell it like it is, with enduring positivity:

https://www.talkingclimate.ca/p/science-vs-greed-at-cop28

I trust Grist to keep its journalistic focus:

https://grist.org/

I trust Earth Justice, because the Earth needs a good lawyer:

https://earthjustice.org/

And now, a poem, not by me but admired by me:

Playing with Bees |RK Fauth

So the world turned
its one good eye

to watch the bees
take most of metaphor
                        with them.

            Swarms—
                        in all their airborne
                    pointillism—
                                shifted on the breeze

for the last time. Of course,

the absence of bees
                                    left behind significant holes
in ecology. Less


                                    obvious
            were the indelible holes
in poems, which would come
                                                            later:

Our vast psychic habitat
shrunk. Nothing was

            like nectar
                                    for the gods

Nobody was warned by
a deep black dahlia, and nobody

grew like a weed.

Nobody felt spry as
                        a daisy, or blue
                        and princely
as a hyacinth; was lucid as
            a moon flower.            Nobody came home


                        and yelled   honey!   up the stairs,

And nothing in particular
by any other name would smell as sweet as—

Consider:
the verbal dearth
that is always a main ripple of extinction.

The lexicon of wilds goes on nixing its descriptions.
Slimming its index of references
for what is

super as a rhubarb, and juicy
as a peach,
or sunken as a
comb and ancient as an alder tree, or
conifer, or beech, what is royal
as jelly, dark as a wintering

hive, toxic as the jessamine vine
who weeps the way a willow does,
silently as wax
burned in the land of milk and

all the strong words in poems,
they were once

smeared on the mandible of a bee.

Keep bees on your mind even in this dead of winter, and thanks to Janice for hosting
us today at Salt City Verse!