Poetry Challenge Results

Three poems have come from the recent challenge to use words from a random list (see here). For the next week, I will post some of the results. Other poems may come in later, as the deadline for this challenge is June 30.

Ed wrote: "Alice Linsley put out another of her challenges. To use words from the following list in a poem of from 12 to 30 lines. I intended to use just some of them, but as this moody piece began to grow, I found more and more of the words being worked into it. The poem finished, but untitled, I discovered I had used all but two of the suggestions, thus the rather cryptic title, implying that there is an untold backstory behind the poem. Maybe there is..."

-caring for none
-a painful splinter
-Presence of the place
-broken egg(s)
-towering presence
-renderings
-forecast
-jiggler
-gentle persuasion
-chorus of wind chimes
-falling away
-forbidden portals
-harmony
-straggling or stranded
-smooth speckled stones
-laboring longer
-dryer than death
-fists
-longing

Here is the first response to the Poetry Challenge.

Lay of the Angry Jiggler of the Smooth Speckled Stones
by Ed Pacht

Caring for none, dryer than death,
his empty spirit falling away,
he trudges onward in a weary road,
with a smoldering bitterness deep within
that pierces like a painful splinter,
laboring longer, clenching fists,
longing for he knows not what,
and never coming to find it..

Before him looms a towering presence,
a pair of dark forbidden portals,
opening to a land of ugliness and deep despair,
reeking with the smell of rotting broken eggs,
with a doom forecast for those who fall into its lure,
drawn by their own deep hidden hatreds,
straggling or stranded in their horrid grip,
and falling through those gates into that smoking pit..

But in his ears there is a hint of harmony,
a quiet song of softly gentle sweet persuasion,
whose renderings, like a tinkling wind-chime chorus,
draw his tortured soul to look another way,
to turn aside from those dark portals,
to turn himself toward pleasant gates,
to enter into the Presence of the place,
to know, to find, to love, in joy.