Thursday, June 23, 2011

Poetry Friday: Packing Villanelle

Still working on moving out of state... Less than a week till M-day, when I actually leave town. In honor of the occasion, I thought I'd share a packing poem for Poetry Friday. This villanelle was inspired by a prompt April Halprin Wayland posted during National Poetry Month (see her April 13th entry).

Packing

Packing up to leave a home
with symbols scattered everyplace
is like dismantling a poem.
This metaphor is made of lace,
while that one is a small blue vase.
Packing up to leave a home
calls for a steady, leaning pace.
Removing each bright thing, each trace,
is like dismantling a poem.
Words in boxes. Lines erased,
the startling with the commonplace.
Packing up to leave a home
requires a sudden sort of grace,
for keeping feelings from a face
is like dismantling a poem.
Till nothing's left but one suitcase
and all the rest is empty space.
Packing up to leave a home
is like dismantling a poem.

—Kate Coombs, 2011, all rights reserved
















Poetry Friday is at Carol's Corner today, so stop by and check out the links!

Image is Edward Hopper's painting, Sun in an Empty Room.

6 comments:

storyqueen said...

Love the poem, Kate.

And good luck on your move. My job is changing and I had to pack up the school's literacy room (big, fat room of book collections--5 to 30 copies of each book) because we are not going to have a literacy room anymore. Sad day. Hard to weed through what to keep and what to pass on.

Shelley

Ms. Yingling said...

VERY nice. Seriously, I'm overly critical of poems, but like this one. Villanelles are fun to do, aren't they?

KateCoombs said...

Thanks, Shelley and Ms. Y!

And Shelley, the demise of a literacy room sounds mournful indeed.

Mary Lee said...

Fabulous! You have inspired me to try my hand at a villanelle! You make it look so easy! You picked the perfect image as well.

Best wishes on your move.

KateCoombs said...

Thanks, Mary! I think the hardest part was getting the repeated phrases to line up grammatically with other phrases. :)

Connie Arnold said...

Nice poem, and well done! Hope the move goes as well!