#npm2018

[hepatosaurus]

national poetry month, day 29

My Father and the Figtree For other fruits my father was indifferent. He’d point at the cherry tree and say, “See those? I wish they were figs.” In the evenings he sat by my bed weaving folktales like vivid little scarves. They always involved a figtree. Even when it didn’t fit, he’d stick it in. Once Joha was walking down the road and he saw a figtree. Or, he tied his camel to a figtree and went to sleep. Or, later when they caught and arrested him, his pockets were full of figs. At age six I ate a dried fig and shrugged. “That’s not what I’m talking about!” he said, “I’m talking about a figtree straight from the earth— gift of Allah!—on a branch so heavy it touches the ground. I’m talking about picking the largest fattest sweetest fig in the world and putting it in my mouth.” (Here he’d stop and close his eyes.) Years passed, we lived in many houses, none had figtrees. We had lima beans, zucchini, parsley, beets. “Plant one!” my mother said, but my father never did. He tended the garden half-heartedly, forgot to water, let the okra get too big. “What a dreamer he is. Look how many things he starts and doesn’t finish.” The last time he moved, I got a phone call. My father, in Arabic, chanting a song I’d never heard. “What’s that?” I said. “Wait till you see!” He took me out back to the new yard. There, in the middle of Dallas, Texas, a tree with the largest, fattest, sweetest figs in the world. “It’s a figtree song!” he said, plucking his fruits like ripe tokens, emblems, assurance of a world that was always his own. —Naomi Shihab Nye

[luvleehpoetiklocks]

#afreewrite #30in30 #day10 @luvleehpoetiklocks #npm2018 #npm #poem #luvleehthought #luvleehmoment #release #poet #poetry #poemsbyluvleeh

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#npm2018 #PIPartpopupPOETRY slow but intact, the poem SNOW by Frederick Seidel. Wait for it. (at Saint Paul, Minnesota)

[rflann-blog1]

#NPM2018     

Stupid Cancer’s brand is trendy and very intune with young adult culture and social media usage.  This is helpful since the beneficiaries of the organization are young adults with a cancer diagnosis.  The self proclaimed progressive organization reaches its audience by using age appropriate language in all of its writings on the main website, twitter, facebook, and all other platforms.  The social media presence is abundant with over thirty thousand twitter followers and over three-hundred thousand facebook likes and followers.  For this organization especially it is important to have a social media presence because young adults turn to social media for help. Their brand addresses political issues on social media that affect healthcare to show support for their audience and retweet other organizations as outside resources.  Organizations geared towards younger audiences need to rely heavily on a social media presence and Stupid Cancer portrays a young, hip, yet informative voice quite well.  I think because of this heavily young adult focused brand, young adults would prefer more to volunteer and fundraise because of the connection they feel to the brand.  

The picture below further proves the point of the organization's brand being trendy.  They use slang words such “cray” “nut” and “boob” on their homepage alone, to help connect with their young adult audience.  Though if these words were used for an older generation's organization it may be deemed inappropriate, young adults likely be more drawn to a website like this as it is more upbeat and more authentic to them.    

See below for article published by NIH focusing on importance of how nurses can start the social media conversation for young adult patients and help them find resources. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28945728    

[thefrostplace-blog]

Quote of the Day | #NPM2018

Quote of the Day | #NPM2018

[frombehindthepen]

It's Time to Get Your Poetry On during National Poetry Month #NPM2018 #Poetry #AcademyofAmericanPoets Well Y'all, today begins National Poetry Month. This annual commemoration during the month of April was inaugurated by the Academy of American Poets in 1996.

[hepatosaurus]

national poetry month, day 1

God’s Grandeur The world is charged with the grandeur of God.     It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;     It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?           Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;     And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;     And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. And for all this, nature is never spent     There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went     Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs— Because the Holy Ghost over the bent     World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings. —Gerard Manley Hopkins

[hepatosaurus]

national poetry month, day 16

Prescription If afraid, cured leather & wood-smoke. If forgotten, sassafras & hominy. If remembered, bright blue hook. If bereft, lamb sizzling. If rupture, obsidian & chickweed. If suture, sleep curled around a pine tree. If surge, puddle of milk. If shadow, puddle of gasoline. If gender, shadow hurtling overhead. If gender, dream in a language you don’t know. If gender, swim parallel to shore. If morning, sunspots & black pepper. If mourning, black spot on a lung. If harvest, blood sport & blood work. If language, cracked branches. If ghost, funeral suit worn thin at the knees. If rainstorm, core of candle. If closeness, death wish & warm dram. If addict, human. If addict, suture & nuzzle. If caught out, folly and muzzle. If walk, decade of tiny crosshatches. If ruby glass, pick out the stitches with your teeth. If itch, reorganize the sky. If itch, dropped stitch & chipped saucer. If blackout, cinnabar & fallout shelter. If walk, keep walking. —Nina Puro

[hepatosaurus]

national poetry month, day 15

The Old Lady I have dreed my dree, I have wooed my wyrd, and now I shall grow a five-foot beard and braid it into tiny braids and wander where the webfoot wades among the water’s shining blades. I will fear nothing I have feared. I’m the queen of spades, the jack of trades, braiding my knives into my beard. Why should I know what I have known? Once was enough to make it my own. The things I got I will forget. I’ll knot my beard into a net and cast the net and catch a fish who will ungrant my every wish and leave me nothing but a stone on the riverbed alone, leave me nothing but a rock where the feet of herons walk. —Ursula K. Le Guin

[hepatosaurus]

national poetry month, day 10

In the Mushroom Summer Colorado turns Kyoto in a shower, mist in the pines so thick the crows delight (or seem to), winging in obscurity. The ineffectual panic of a squirrel who chattered at my passing gave me pause to watch his Ponderosa come and go— long needles scratching cloud. I’d summited but knew it only by the wildflower meadow, the muted harebells, paintbrush, gentian, scattered among the locoweed and sage. Today my grief abated like water soaking underground, its scar a little path of twigs and needles winding ahead of me downhill to the next bend. Today I let the rain soak through my shirt and was unharmed.   —David Mason

[hepatosaurus]

national poetry month, day 30

How We Made a New Art on Old Ground A famous battle happened in this valley.                     You never understood the nature poem.   Till now. Till this moment—if these statements                    seem separate, unrelated, follow this   silence to its edge and you will hear                    the history of air: the crispness of a fern   or the upward cut and turn around of                    a fieldfare or thrush written on it.   The other history is silent: The estuary                    is over there. The issue was decided here:   Two kings prepared to give no quarter.                    Then one king and one dead tradition.   Now the humid dusk, the old wounds                    wait for language, for a different truth:   When you see the silk of the willow                    and the wider edge of the river turn   and grow dark and then darker, then                    you will know that the nature poem   is not the action nor its end: it is                    this rust on the gate beside the trees, on the cattle grid underneath our feet,                    on the steering wheel shaft: it is   an aftermath, an overlay and even in                    its own modest way, an art of peace: I try the word distance and it fills with                    sycamores, a summer’s worth of pollen   And as I write valley straw, metal                    blood, oaths, armour are unwritten.   Silence spreads slowly from these words                    to those ilex trees half in, half out   of shadows falling on the shallow ford                    of the south bank beside Yellow Island   as twilight shows how this sweet corrosion                    begins to be complete: what we see   is what the poem says:                    evening coming—cattle, cattle-shadows— and whin bushes and a change of weather                    about to change them all: what we see is how the place and the torment of the place are                    for this moment free of one another. —Eavan Boland

[hepatosaurus]

national poetry month, day 27

On the Sorrow of Apiary Thieves Bee farmers warn: the good honey’s gone. All of it’s been harvested. What’s left               is chaff, summer’s dead matter. Give up, intruders, cry the guards— this season, the bees won’t wake, and the honey               of their sleep is noxious. It is said that when bees can’t migrate, they hibernate in a dragnet of bodies               around the queen, rotating outward for warmth so no one dies. But somewhere in the outskirts, a worker bee might fall               into a coma, envision a lighthouse of nectar, viscid daisies trapped in royal jelly. She must’ve dreamt this, drifting farther               from the nucleus of spit-warmth and swaying. There is no place for dreamers like her in a complex system: metropole               of honeyless apiary, its deadbeat machinery. I can’t explain my trespassing with something simple, like the yen for honey,               or humectants for a lady’s quondam queendom. The hive breathes all the wishes I don’t have. Empty haven, lantern of viands—               I almost miss the way the skylights once chased my shadow across topiaries, each footprint striating the damp loam               along the knoll, toward the bees, what quiet, what hum. This time, I take only the bees that don’t thaw, frozen and harmless,               their home on the ground. —Sally Wen Mao

[hepatosaurus]

national poetry month, day 6

The Tunnel   A man has been standing in front of my house for days. I peek at him from the living room window and at night, unable to sleep, I shine my flashlight down on the lawn. He is always there.   After a while I open the front door just a crack and order him out of my yard. He narrows his eyes and moans. I slam the door and dash back to the kitchen, then up to the bedroom, then down.   I weep like a child and make obscene gestures through the window. I write large suicide notes and place them so he can read them easily. I destroy the living room furniture to prove I own nothing of value. When he seems unmoved I decide to dig a tunnel to a neighboring yard. I seal the basement off from the upstairs with a brick wall. I dig hard and in no time the tunnel is done. Leaving my pick and shovel below, I come out in front of a house and stand there too tired to move or even speak, hoping someone will help me. I feel I’m being watched and sometimes I hear a man’s voice, but nothing is done and I have been waiting for days.   —Mark Strand

[hepatosaurus]

national poetry month, day 12

I Was Popular in Certain Circles   Among the river rats and the leaves. For example. I was huge among the lichen, and the waterfall couldn’t get enough of me. And the gravestones? I was hugely popular with the gravestones. Also with the meat liquefying beneath. I’d say to the carrion birds, I’d say, “Are you an eagle? I can’t see so well.” That made them laugh until we were screaming. Eagle. Imagine.   The vultures loved me so much they’d feed me the first morsel. From their delicate talons, which is what I called them: such delicate talons. They loved me so deeply they’d visit in pairs. One to feed me. One to cover my eyes with its velvety wings. Which were heavy as theater curtains. Which I was sure to remark on. “Why can’t I see what I’m eating?” I’d say. And the wings would pull me into the great bird’s chest. And I’d feel the nail inside my mouth.   What pals I was with all the scavengers! And the dead things too. What pals. As for the living, the fox would not be outdone. We’d sit on the cliff’s edge and watch the river like a movie and I’d say, “I think last night…” and the fox would put his paw on top of mine and say, “Forget it. It’s done.” I mean, we had fun. You haven’t lived until a fox has whispered something the ferns told him in your one good ear. I mean truly. You have not lived. —Gabrielle Calvocoressi

[hepatosaurus]

national poetry month, day 9

The Letter I’m not feeling strong yet, but I am taking good care of myself. The weather is perfect. I read and walk all day and then walk to the sea. I expect to swim soon. For now I am content. I am not sure what I hope for. I feel I am doing my best. It reminds me of when I was sixteen dreaming of Lorca, the gentle trees outside and the creek. Perhaps poetry replaces something in me that others receive more naturally. Perhaps my happiness proves a weakness in my life. Even my failures in poetry please me. Time is very different here. It is very good to be away from public ambition. I sweep and wash, cook and shop. Sometimes I go into town in the evening and have pastry with custard. Sometimes I sit at a table by the harbor and drink half a beer. —Linda Gregg

[hepatosaurus]

national poetry month, day 22

Some Feel Rain Some feel rain. Some feel the beetle startle in its ghost-part when the bark slips. Some feel musk. Asleep against each other in the whiskey dark, scarcely there. When it falls apart, some feel the moondark air drop its motes to the patch-thick slopes of snow. Tiny blinkings of ice from the oak, a boot-beat that comes and goes, the line of prayer you can follow from the dusking wind to the snowy owl it carries. Some feel sunlight well up in blood-vessels below the skin and wish there had been less to lose. Knowing how it could have been, pale maples drowsing like a second sleep above our temperaments. Do I imagine there is any place so safe it can’t be snapped? Some feel the rivers shift, blue veins through soil, as if the smokestacks were a long dream of exhalation. The lynx lets its paws skim the ground in snow and showers. The wildflowers scatter in warm tints until the second they are plucked. You can wait to scrape the ankle-burrs, you can wait until Mercury the early star underdraws the night and its blackest districts. And wonder. Why others feel through coal-thick night that deeply colored garnet star. Why sparring and pins are all you have. Why the earth cannot make its way towards you. —Joanna Klink