A Renga For Alice

Here is the finished shared poem whose first three lines are my adaptation of a Lewis Carroll quotation. The final five lines and the title are also mine.

I am very grateful to my fellow contributors whose names follow their words below. Click on each to view their thoughtful and interesting sites, well worth a visit!

Hanging By A Thread

Each life bears upon
Or else ought to bear upon
The lives of others

Symbiosis of the web
A spider spins intricate

In shoots of fine silk
Like the pearl net of Indra
Interconnected                                                                 Christine Valentor

Connections breed fair patterns
Of symmetry and fractals

All bound together
Universal complexities
Nature can breed life                                                        dave ply

Sun, moon and seas sing in tune
A chorus to greet each dawn

Falling on the earth
Within white flesh, five ripe seeds
The fragrant orchard                                                         cathum

Arachne weaves worldwide webs
Eight wise fingers feel the pulse

High wire artist
Show how to nurture nature
Help us spin it out

 

Web of Life

I’m inviting contributions to another shared poem.

The Lewis Carroll biography has been a blast, all 600 pages of it! You certainly don’t need to share his religious beliefs to appreciate his generous, rational and inclusive philosophy of life.

Good deeds, he suggests, transcend any particular religious affiliation. Good includes ‘all that is brave, and manly, and true in human nature’ and ‘a man may honour these qualities, even though he own to no religious beliefs whatever’.  This kind of good that transcends religion, he calls ‘reverence’.

His language may sound a little quaint to modern ears but his message is crystal clear. He was a born communicator who cherished the innocence of childhood. He loved the natural world and campaigned against all forms of cruelty, including animal experiments. He would surely embrace the ecological movement with its powerful scientific understanding of – and deep reverence for – the connections between all living things.

Now it hardly matters whether all this came about by divine intention or just glorious happenstance if we can all agree that life is sacred. And as the creator of the Alice books believed, we live in a fabulous wonderland whose mysteries we are only just beginning to unravel:

A truth … is becoming more and more clear to me as life passes away – that God’s purpose, in this wonderfully complex life of ours, is mutual interaction all round. Every life … bears upon, or ought to bear upon, the lives of others. (LC)

                                                                   Image: thedogmuseum.com

Using this idea as a starting point, in tribute to Lewis Carroll, I would like to invite contributions to another renga. Below is the poem so far …

A renga is a shared poem which begins with a haiku (an unrhymed poem of 5-7-5 syllables) to which are added 2 more lines (each one 7 syllables) to form a tanka (an unrhymed poem of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables). Another haiku then starts the process again.

So each new contributor adds 5 lines, converting the previous haiku to a tanka and then writing a new haiku for someone else to convert. This continues until I decide to bring the poem to a close by completing the final tanka and adding a concluding haiku. The finished poem will then be published with my co-authors credited.

 

Each life bears upon
Or else ought to bear upon
The lives of others

Symbiosis of the web
A spider spins intricate

In shoots of fine silk
Like the pearl net of Indra
Interconnected

Connections breed fair patterns
Of symmetry and fractals

All bound together
Universal complexities
Nature can breed life

Sun, moon and seas sing in tune
A chorus to greet each dawn

Falling on the earth
Within white flesh, five ripe seeds
The fragrant orchard

 

 

Rengarama

Here is the completed poem. Many thanks to my fellow contributors who each provided five lines. Click on the names to view their excellent sites. The first three and last five lines are mine, as is the title. I decided to dispense with sentence punctuation, apart from a single question mark. I like questions and feel this one is important to the poem.

            

siren song

walk at the tide’s edge
here where ceaseless ocean surf
whispers to the land

prehistoric sharks teeth gleam
pools appear and disappear

wave shush absorbs sound
I float in the vast cold sea
from whence we all came                                                Fans of Johnny Dowd

my blood merges echoing
memories of ancestors

who will keep this song
from the silence of neglect?
ripples collect thoughts                                                     memadtwo

the great oceans sing their thoughts
reverberating whale songs

frothy tidal surge
playing wet snare drum brushes
sea lions bark cadence                                                          daveply

as stars illuminate life
to imbue the foam with awe

a planet’s dreams wish
to encapsulate a wave
on which to escape                                                                   opher

the water’s depths invite me
into their coolness within

and in the coolness
life renews
and I am ready to live again                                                 Steve Higgins

waves that sail the seven seas
will carry me back to land

wide-eyed castaway
washed up on another shore
with fresh tales to tell

 

 

 

 

 

 

Image: pinterest.com

Renga

This is my second attempt to create a shared poem on WordPress. I thought the first one, a series of linked haikus, turned out really well. Click here to view the finished poem: https://davekingsbury.wordpress.com/2016/03/28/haikumania-the-results/

This time there are some refinements. A renga is a shared poem which begins with a haiku (an unrhymed 3 line poem of 5-7-5 syllables) to which are added two more lines (each of 7 syllables) which thereby forms a tanka (an unrhymed 5 line poem of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables). The process continues with a new haiku which also gains two lines to become a tanka … and so on.

I thought it would be fun for each contributor to convert the previous haiku to a tanka and then write a new haiku for someone else to convert. I’ll write the first haiku and invite someone to add two 7-syllable lines plus a new 5-7-5 haiku. Each new contributor continues this pattern until I decide to bring the poem to a close by finishing the last tanka and adding a concluding haiku.

Anyone can participate more than once if they wish, the only bar being don’t add to your own haiku. Please use the Leave A Reply box because hitting Reply may jumble things up.

There should be some connection, however slight,  with the contribution immediately preceding yours – a tanka should hang together and a haiku have some link with the previous tanka. This shouldn’t stop people striking out in new directions, however. You may prefer to ignore earlier lines. Half the fun is watching the poem shift emphasis and I relish the challenge of pulling disparate elements together at the end!

This is the poem so far, although please check the Reply boxes in case the latest contribution is there. I’ll add new lines here as they come in and credit them in the finished poem. Thank you for your contributions.

Walk at the tide’s edge
Here where ceaseless ocean surf
Whispers to the land.

Prehistoric sharks teeth gleam
Pools appear and disappear

Wave shush absorbs sound
I float in the vast, cold sea
From whence we all came.

my blood merges echoing
memories of ancestors

who will keep this song
from the silence of neglect?
ripples collect thoughts

The great oceans sing their thoughts
Reverberating whale songs

Frothy tidal surge
Playing wet snare drum brushes
Sea lions bark cadence

As stars illuminate life
To imbue the foam with awe

A planet’s dreams wish
To encapsulate a wave
On which to escape

The water’s depths invite me
into their coolness within

And in the coolness
life renews
and I am ready to live again

 Renga now closed. Finished version on https://davekingsbury.wordpress.com/2016/04/15/rengarama/.

Tribes Without Passports, People without States

Click on the link below for a stimulating post from a sharp and thought-provoking WordPress blog. I love any attempt to come up with new thinking and this endeavours to break up the consensual log-jam. Its idealism reminds me of my first ever post, which I present below as a naïve introduction.

My voyage of exploration begins. I want to recapture the spirit of childhood, when we would set out from home with the deliberate aim of getting hopelessly lost. No point in going over old ground, after all.

Source: Tribes Without Passports, People without States

A Pat on the Back

My blog is a few months old and I have just received a nomination for The Blogger Recognition Award. I would like to thank T. Wayne of A Joyful Process for this. Click on the blog title in the previous sentence to view his many thoughtful, varied and readable posts.

The rules for this award are very specific:

1. Select 15 other blogs you want to give the award to

2. You cannot nominate yourself or the person who has nominated you.

3. Write a post to show your award.

4. Give a brief story of how your blog started.

5. Give a piece of advice or two to new bloggers.

6. Thank whoever nominated you and provide a link to their blog.

7. Attach the award badge to the post (right click and save, then upload.)

8. Comment on each blog and let them know you have nominated them.

9. Provide a link  to the original post on Edge of Night 

For #9, click the name above. For the rest, here goes …

I started my blog because I was looking for something a little deeper than Facebook. Don’t get me wrong, I love splashing about in the shallow end but I like to get out of my depth sometimes. How else will I know if I can swim?

I try to be adventurous and not worry too much about my image or ‘niche-appeal’. To be fair, a narrow focus may suit some bloggers but I prefer to be unconstrained – at least until I discover an authentic writing voice.

I view blogging as a global writers’ collective, an inspiring stage in humanity’s lurch towards cultural evolution. I often comment on other posts, partly as a way of building my own readership but also because blogging is a two-way thing – a dialogue between like minds.

My own nominations seem to share these ideals and values. I search for satire, reflection, laughter, passion, insight, sharing – here are a few of the blogs where I find them .  I’m following 128 sites and many of them are no less rewarding than these, so please accept my apology if yours isn’t here:

garfieldhug.wordpress.com

problemswithinfinity.com

opherworld.wordpress.com

thetroublesometraveller.com

storytimewithjohn.com

publikworks.wordpress.com

nebusresearch.wordpress.com

eddiestarblog.wordpress.com

stevehigginslive.com

thenicessist.com

bensbitterblog.com

sillyoldsod.com

stephellaneous.wordpress.com

echoesfromthepath.com

entertishworld.com

Please let me know if I’ve got anything wrong. A post like this stretches the cyberskills of an old codger like me!