NovPAD 2024 • 09 & 10

Soil • Flora

This month’s theme: “Where I Am: Poems of Place”

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11/09 • Soil

This is blank verse – the meter is iambic pentameter but no rhymes are prescribed. If you’re reading on your phone, turning it sideways should eliminate any line-wrapping that breaks up the form.

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O God whose providence is small enough
to count accumulating grains of sand,
immense enough to heave the boulders from
their streambed homes and measure mountains’ roots;
to raise an eyebrow, crack the flimsy crust
around the molten heart that beats
beneath our feet; whose sandals carried hues
like coded clues to all the roads you walked
along the way to where your heart grew cold:
be near us as our atoms sing their dirge
diminishing as they return to dust.

—

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11/10 • Flora

This is a syllabic and internally rhyming Welsh form: cywydd llosgyrnog (kew-iith loss-gr-nog) (best guess) (I'm an amateur) (don’t quote me), which Google tells me means "a fiery poem." I cheated and added a syllable to the last line. You can probably see the syllable count and rhyme scheme. If it’s unclear to you, it goes like this:

• 8-xxxxxxxA

• 8-xxxxxxxA

• 7-xxxAxxB

• 8-xxxxxxxC

• 8-xxxxxxxC

• 7-xxxCxxB

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Some succulents will drop a leaf
if you look at them funny, grief
over a brief encounter
with nothing meant amiss, a kiss
of contact the yawning abyss.
You’ve barely made this plant stir

but evidently just enough
to leave a mark. It’s after rough
handling their true toughness shows.
Leave the leaf alone on the dirt
and watch blessing grow from hurt
as it exerts its will to grow.

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Photo by María Álvares de Carvalho on Unsplash