Dream Poem #4: Dreaming With Darwish

 

Well, things have been a bit quiet around here (the blog) for several weeks, and I don’t know where the summer has gone. My daughter is still displaced and dealing with insurance after her house fire. We’ve been working slowly on some house projects, and there have been a few trips out of town, including a recent last minute trip to Indiana and the IMA. I took another class through Tweetspeak Poetry on Mindfulness and I’ve been contemplating where I want to go with my writing. Oh, and I’ve been caught up in another poetry dare…

 

 

 

As part of a new Poetry Dare, I have a daily date with the Palestinian national poet, Mahmoud Darwish, and The Butterfly’s Burden—three books of dream-like poetry in translation.

This dare’s a doozy in two parts: in addition to reading at least one poem a day from this collection, there’s an add-on challenge of actually writing one to three dream poems a week plus four traditional form poems—a sestina, a villanelle, a pantoum, and a rondeau. There’s not a sonnet in the crew, but I wonder if there’s extra credit for tackling one, like maybe a pot of jasmine perfume or a packet of pomegranate tea.

While I wait for my copy of The Butterfly’s Burden to arrive, I spend some time trying to learn a little about the poet . . .

Follow me here to find out what I’m learning… and read a poem I wrote that belongs in my dream poem series. 🙂

 

 

 

And how was your summer?

In the stillness,

Sandy