My tired gray hair destroys zeal.

Cat sticks in the thicket deep.

A long time ago we spoke.

Here's a challenge for any poet out there...and a tiny bit of critique, on this site many of the poems are about the same subject, love, sadness, the blackness of life, suicide, hate for the life they are in, nature. And they are often times very general. What about something more specific, a moment, an event, a person,

Here's the challenge:
Find one of your favorite poets and pick a poem you like by them. Look at the subject matter and write a poem of your own using the same or a similar subject matter. Leave your poem in the comments section...


Here's my poet and poem i picked:

The Morning Baking

Grandma, come back, I forgot
How much lard for these rolls

Think you can put yourself in the ground
Like plain potatoes and grow in Ohio?
I am **** sick of getting fat like you

Think you can lie through your Slovak?
Tell filthy stories about the blood sausage?
Pish-pish nights at the ****** in Detroit?

I blame your raising me up for my Slav tongue
You beat me up out back, taught me to dance

I'll tell you I don't remember any kind of bread
Your wavy loaves of flesh
Stink through my sleep
The stars on your silk robes

But I'm glad I'll look when I'm old
Like a gypsy dusha hauling milk

by Carolyn Forché

Disaster mister why do you haunt me?
Why do you send me beauty formed of friend
singing lullabies, wooing me even though he says
Not him, not me.
I can not help myself
craving his eyes to look, from a distant place
in the room I swoon in.

Upon my hands, the white of my skin,
the arc of my back, my shy insecurity.
His eyes never sway, swerve, or veer upon
any other delight that might tempt him with angelic grace.

This daydream consumes me,
each moment of waking hours ticked off by
a pretend tearing me from my life in three dimensions.

"The man of God does everything opposite to what the world does or approves of; he goes "against the grain" of society because he knows these things displease God"

So I fail to be upright, in full view.
   I ask to take this replayed vision away,
          remove the desire,
               change me, change this, let me know, remove my life.

Be bold enough
to send me to him
or from him
or him to me
or him from me
Or what have you given us all these days?

Goodbye...why?

Don't leave out the wandering door,
sit and finish these spiraled nutted cookies,
Apple Hill Special from the twisting trees
aging in the generations old summer tilled acreages.

We can glide our right hips over our right thighs

Shut down that calling of faint voices,
chattering through their cocktail party smiles.
While they promise a wealthy life
of building the all the world's a  stage,
hammers fall one-two, one-two.

Rest here your child upon this wood plank floor,
see how he crawls swiftly, ambling upwards, notice his mobility?

Child's pose, rest here

The pocked market walls of this tatty room enshrine him,
he has laid his foot falls down, see,
Resounding, forever to re-sound.

Breath in, breathing out

Wait You!
Before you leave,
turn towards the rising horizon,
this foothill sun has still to set.
The day draws on so we can listen, the fiddler,
have you seen him yet? In town? No?
Then you shall not leave until his strings are spent.

The body of a tree
stretches beyond arm's length
of our five year plan,
brittle leaves descending upon our child's head.