NaPoWriMo#30 This Cruel Season

K.Hartless,
Émile Bernard, ‘Damned Women’, woodcut from Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal (1916)

Hold me.
Say nothing.
Hidden somewhere near
where the soil is rich
and full of snails,
I will dig myself
a nice deep grave.
Tonight, I’ll be dead
drunk and lay myself
in the ground.

Music often takes me
like the sea.
You’re like the rock
the sea is swallowing,
lightning….then darkness.
Lovely fugitive whose
glance has brought me
back to life. You whom
I might have loved
and who knew that, too.

Pour me your poison.
Let me be comforted.
Pity me, if not,
to hell with you!

NaPoWriMo#30~The final challenge this year was to create a patchwork poem, also called a collage poem or a cento. As the name suggests, this poem is made up of lines taken from other poems.

I’ve created one today from a favorite poetry book of mine, Les Fleurs du Mal written by the brilliant Charles Baudelaire. My copy of the text is translated by Richard Howard. And while it’s near impossible to pick a bad line from this collection of poems, this patchwork piece represents some of my favorite fragments, and I do so hope you enjoy it.

Sources:

Title: #89 The Sun
Lines 1-3: #66 Autumn Sunset
Lines 4-7: #77 The Happy Corpse
Lines 8-10: #108 The Murderer’s Wine

Lines 11-12: #71 Music
Lines 13-14: #42 Semper Eadem
Lines 15–18: #82 To a Woman Passing By
Lines 18-20: #95 Impassing

Line 21-22: #131 Traveling
Line 22-24: #20 Epigraph for a Banned Book

Published by K.Hartless

K.Hartless is a persistent poet and eclectic fiction writer. She’s been recently published in Luna Station Quarterly, The Last Girls Club, Edge of Humanity Magazine, Pure Haiku, and Spillwords. Her blog, Yardsale of Thoughts, blends fiction, poetry, music, and art to create new experiences for readers.

21 Comments

    1. Thank you. We had an outdoor event this morning, so I was sitting there pulling lines from these poems much to the befuddlement of neighbors and strangers alike. It was a refreshing exercise this making art from art. Hope your weekend is filled with sunshine. 💜

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

    1. Thank you for reading all of these. It was exhausting, not to write everyday as that is normal but to have the challenge of a prompt. It was wonderful to connect with talented writers such as yourself on a similar journey. 🦋

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

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