Adrift: my wife is missing
And cannot be returned.
I bought the grave and visit
To grieve where she resides.

My son left six months after.
He visits when he can
And fills the room with words.
It helps, but goes away.

At night the rafters move
And possums growl outside,
But no sounds hold at bay
The silence that destroys.


		17 August 2023

Notes

17/8/2023 I discovered a poetry site called AllPoetry. There are thousands of active poet on the site, and it seems a very supportive community. You don't have to like everything that's there (not even my stuff) but there are things that seem quite good, and you just pass over what doesn't suit you.

So I started by posting Midwinter, which several people liked. You need to play fair - so when you start, you need to comment on two other newly published pieces by other poets. I think you have to either have a paid subscription or review 100 poems before you can post without commenting. You can collect points from people by writing constructive criticism or just liking their stuff, but if you like their stuff or someone else's you give away some of those points. This tends to make people be on their best behaviour, trying to help.

Once you have managed this little bit of background work, you also get to run contests should you choose. Again, you give away some of your points doing this. So in response to a prompt & contest "When there's only silence", I wrote Heart Failure. This contest was already in day 3 of 3, so I wrote it fairly quickly - about 15 minutes. Normally I would sit and polish this further, but the prompt disturbed me too much to do that in the time frame requested.

As it turned out, I came 5th out of 12 and got an "honourable winner award" and some points. There was another competition that interested me, asking for poems from your closet, so I posted The Wanderer, my second "real" poem from the mid 70s and one I still think stacks up. So that one put at 4th out of 14. And you can read the notes about Milton In Haiku elsewhere.

Issues with not polishing this - the meter is mostly iambic trimeter, but a few of the lines have a soft 7th syllable. It's a minor irritation, and I may go back and edit it, in which case what appears now as the poem will shift to "original poem"