{pf: p7 repeats the anaphora}

Happy November!

We’ve made it this far! Only a few more days ’til the Midterm Election madness is OVAH! …and then, we start the next Presidential cycle… God Almighty, preserve us…


Okay, so today the Seven Sisters are not honestly repeating a poetic form – this is a new one for us. I’m punning on the repeating pattern of words in the anaphora, which I love. (Also, shout out to my sisters, none of whom are actually nuns, though the idea of a nice long dark dress and a contemplative lifestyle definitely has its merits just now!) Our theme was, loosely, grace in the face of loss. Gratitude, while letting go. The end of the season, the end of a day, these are losses in their own way. I have a poem about surrendering the cares of the day in my head but it didn’t get finished in time…

The anaphora poetic form is, in some respects, fairly simple. It’s not confined to syllables or pentameter – any style of prose or poem will do, as long as one uses the repetition of a word or phase. It worked for Winston Churchill and Martin Luther King, Jr. It’s part of the swinging cadence of sermons and political speeches (which we’re all paying avid attention to this month so we can VOTE, right? Right). So, on the surface, this was one of the easier challenges I could come up with for a very, very busy month.

Do you ever get the feeling that October is like kicking a ball downhill that only picks up speed in November? Most of us have snatched a moment here or there for poetry this month, but it’s not been a time to stop and smell the roses for many of us. Thus, today’s poem is… meant to recapture the last time we really could slow and observe things as we wanted to — childhood. I thought of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1929 “A Child’s Garden of Verses,” and this became a child’s autumn verse – celebrating the moon and the muck and the bugs in a new season, and all the adventures to be had evading bedtime, at the end of the day. If I’d thought about it, I could have finished the poem with the morning and giving up the loss of night time, but, oh well. I’m taking a page out of Laura’s book today, and combining the poem with an illustration.


I’m grateful this poem came to me, because everything else I came up with was really heavy and dark, and — no. Enough with that right now. This is a month of gratitude, and so I’m thankful for the opportunity to stop and hunker down in the weeds to see what treasures might be discovered.

Other discoveries this month are at Laura’s blog. Tricia’s poem – which she is probably still tweaking – is here. Liz is ,a href=”http://lizgartonscanlon.com/2018/11/poetry-project-november-2018/”>burying her lede. Andi joins us again this month, Kelly’s poem she composed on the fly while Sara’s traveling and will post later this month.

Happy month of gratitude. I’m thankful that Poetry Friday today is hosted over at the amazing and vote-centric Alphabet Soup by Jama-j, who is all things awesome.

9 Replies to “{pf: p7 repeats the anaphora}”

  1. I would go head off into a contemplative life with the six of you any day!
    And Tanita… I know I’ve said this before, but I always love the way you talk ABOUT your poetry, the musings and heartfelt philosophizing behind every perfect, poetic line. It makes me feel so close to the poems and so close to you… This is all just beautiful….

  2. Now I’m thinking of a poem entitled If We Were Nuns. Ah, the potential! But you’ve made something holy from the “muck and bracken and weeds” and I find such joy in your images, and sounds, and especially in “daringly, damselflies call down the moon.” I could feel that mini fairy spell trip off my tongue many times.

  3. T., this is so beautiful. I want to follow you down into that hollow and listen to the cicadas while watching the moon rise. Lovely photo and such delightful lines. Thanks for reminding me of those childhood days-ends.

  4. love love love ! So lyrical with childlike earnestness. When I got to the fairy sprites I practically squealed with delight — surprise! And “downbeat” is brilliant in the last stanza. Thanks for this most brilliant evocative poem. 🙂

  5. Oh my goodness, I adore this poem. The last stanza is my absolute favorite, but the fairies and frogspawn line is a close second. This really does capture childhood and that time when we’re aware of how different our world is from the grown-up world. Love your image poem! And I had to laugh at the thought of us 7 being a group of nuns. I bet we would be, in turns, the most joyous, outraged, loving, and poetic nuns ever:>)

    1. And PS, I apparently totally ignored an assigned theme for our poem. Oops. It was not on purpose, but I felt lucky to get a poem, period, as I am definitely in that frazzled, ball rolling downhill mode you mentioned!

    2. @laurasalas: I’m so glad it works! I was going to use ‘water sprites’ as my sprite, because that’s both a real plant and an imaginary being which lives in water, but I decided that I wanted to go for full on fairy tales – cause I’m whimsical as a matter of course, I guess. And if we WERE nuns, our chapter-house would have poetry painted on the walls and on rocks in the garden, like at Highlights. ☺

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.