MAY DAYS POEMS-'The Last Word' May 31

May 31

On this day in 1669 English civil servant Samuel Pepys recorded his last diary entry. Due to poor eyesight, Pepys finally had to stop working on his famous diary. The diary covered about a decade of his life and is regarded as Britain's most celebrated diary.

The Last Word

A decade of faithfully recorded thoughts

A life captured in a diary

Rich in detail and scope

Reached a premature ending

When the writings of Samuel Pepys

Hit a wall of darkness.

The final entry

The last word

Inked for posterity.

With eyesight failing

And shadows advancing across the page

His pen, he reluctantly laid to rest.

The writer found himself

Out of sight

Not out of mind.

Comments

Poetry Inspired by Images and Objects

There are many ways pictures and photographs can be conscripted to support the writing of poetry. Allow me to share a few ideas with you: Old photographs are a great source of inspiration. Cynthia Rylant explored this idea with great success in her book 'Something Permanent' where she employed the Depression era photographs of Walker Evans to add a new voice to the starkness to the lives of people experienced under extreme circumstances. I have used this strategy to spark many individual poems. In ' I Bet There's No Broccoli On The Moon,' I used a photo I had taken in 2004 while living in New York to inspire a poem. The poem was based on a story related by a friend who grew up in New York. I regularly combined poetry and pictures in my writer's notebook, drawing on inspiration from the photograph and my personal memories. We can also utilize existing cartoons and illustrations to create ekphrastic poems. I frequently use the illustrations of Jim Pavlidis to co...

Powerful Poetry, 'Refugees' by Brian Bilston

This week, Poetry Friday is hosted by Janice Scully @ Salt City Verse where Janice shares some original words and offers us a taste of Thomas Carlyle to ponder. I encourage you to join a host of poets from all around the globe and visit Janice's page... Almost two years to the day, I wrote a post featuring the poem 'Refugees' by Brian Bilston. The poem was included in Brian's first book of poetry, 'You Took The Last Bus Home.' A very powerful Reverso poem and technically brilliant. A Reverso poem can be read from top to bottom or bottom to top. It will often express opposite opinions depending on which way you read it. Such poems really make us think. A Reverso poem is like a picture turned upside down, a frowning face upended to reveal a smiling one. The poem read in reverse, contradicts itself with an opposing message. In 'Refugee' Brian Bilston focuses on a societal issue that tends to polarize feelings and the opposing views are clearly in eviden...

Poetry Friday 'Storm On The Island' Seamus Heaney

Given the fact that we recently celebrated St Patrick's Day, it seems appropriate that I take this opportunity to continue the Irish focus and recognize one of Ireland's leading literary figures... Seamus Heaney was born in County Derry in Northern Ireland in 1939 and died in 2013. He became a multi award winning poet. His first collection of poems, 'Death of a Naturalist' appeared in 1966 and helped to establish Heaney as one of the major poets of the 20th century. From that first anthology, I have chosen 'Storm On The Island.' This poem tells us about the stoic resistance of people and structures to an incoming storm. The island is not named. Poetic scholars believe this is a poem that can be taken literally, as a monologue on the life and attitude of island people facing a storm, or it can be understood as a metaphor of political struggle on the island of Ireland. Heaney knew both worlds. The poems of this first collection are grounded in the soil...

Search This Blog