Spices of the Heart

On Tuesday, we had another of our "Tweet Parties" (poetry jams) over at TweetSpeak Poetry. Five of us participated, and our moderator, the famous @tspoetry herself, used lines from Rodale Publishing's Herbs and Renee Loux’s Living Cuisine throughout the jam to prompt, encuarge and stimulate. The final, edited resulted is posted under the title of "The Walled Garden of Spices and Herbs."

The jam lasts for an hour. I participate as both contributor and editor-to-be. So I Tweetdeck open and set up to search the #tsp hashtag, and Twitter open, and Word open so I can cut and paste contributions essentially as they happen. It's multi-tasking at its most breathless craziness, but it's also great fun to watch all of this unfold. Later, I go back and edit.

This morning, I sliced out my own contributions from the jam, to see if they could stand on their own. I think they do, but the lines resulted from a lot of interaction and back-and-forth, so this is more like an individual poem infused with group contributions.

Spices of the Heart

My heart pours bittersweet, hot.
Piercing, shredding golden chambers, golden ventricles,
Golden heart once crowned with bay,
Now tattered.
A taste of cloves, a taste of laurel, a taste of death.
Upon the path,
Atrampled leafy crown.

The scent of chilies, red hot,
Assaulting the smell sense;
The scent of heat, the scent of sweet, the heart of gold.
A mortar, crushing smell,
Crushing heat,
Crushing life,
Grinding fever,
Grinding cloves,
Grinding hearts and crowns.
The grinding turns all to powder,
To shift with the wind,
To move to the skies of cloves,
Of walls,
Of laurels.

The warm aroma of spice and cinnamon
Blends with laurel and cloves.
By the wall, set in thyme,
I sat,
Tired from tending
My garden of the golden heart.
Too little time to court,
To breathe the cloves,
To wear the laurel.
Yet my untended heart of gold waits by the wall.

I cannot wait;
My heart awaits,
My heart awakes from a cloven slumber.
He touches a cinnamon cheek,
A tongue of chili-red lies, of bitterroot taste.

The dove wings on,
With a glance backward
For a brief moment of thyme.
The dove soars above the field of spice,
Brushing the laurel,
Aiming for the sun.
Left by the dove,
The field of spice,
The golden heart,
Pulsing though shredded by the clove,
Left by the wall of thyme,
It lies with the laurel crown.
A love as hollow as a blade of chive,
A love snapped by the cherry sun.
Do you still tend my love,
My golden heart,
My heart in the walled garden?

A hidden prize, buried in leaves and bare woods,
The smile of the dove
Casts a faint shadow
Upon the field of spice
And the garden of golden hearts.
A fleeting glance left for the field,
The dove glides away to heaven.

Reflection on a Tweet Party

Several of us participated in a Tweet Party (poetry jam) on Tuesday night. Most of us tweeted by design, and three accidentally stumbled in. You can see the completed edited version of the jam at TweetSpeak Poetry, under the title of "Love at the Masquerade Ball." The theme was “Love in Character,” and it used famous fictional and not-so-fictional lovers as the starting point (Antony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet, Yuri Zhivago and Lara, Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara, and so on).

I have a dual role in these jams – I participate and I edit the final version. Editing (for me) means following the jam via Tweetdeck with a search open for the #tsp hashtag, Twitter open, and Microsoft Word open, so I can copy and paste from Twitter. The jam lasts for an hour, and sometimes the tweets are flying so fast and thick that I find myself almost breathless while I’m tweeting, reading, copying and pasting, commenting – well, it’s busy. But great fun. The #tsp hashtag is important for capturing all of the contributions, because not all of the participants follow each other on Twitter.

Here are a few of my own contributions to the jam.


Antony: I remember you before the asp.
Cleo: I remember you before the sword.
We danced in the sand
Under the light of the pyramid moon.
She turned to fortunetellers
To see the lines of the sand.

***

In John's England did I
Find myself
A proper lady.
They said I was spectacle,
Eye-catching of courtiers.
The redness of mine,
The whiteness of John's,
Our skins peeled together.
The courtesies of courtiers
Were like sharpened knives at the table.

***

So said Delilah, she of the Philistines.
He wanted stars
But was blinded by pokers of light.

***

Frankly, my dear
I wish for hand of lilac scent
To touch my brow.
Will you remember me, tomorrow, Rhett?
Another tomorrow, another day,
With pride, with prejudice, perhaps with love.

***


Of all the famous loves I've known
Across the pages of imagination,
None surpasses my own true love

***

My green earth
My good earth,
The soil of my love.

***

As the sun fair doth rise in the east
As the moon most pale doth set in the west,
Strangers when they met,
Bonded souls when they parted.
In the cold mist did
Yuri touch
The pale cheek of Lara.
The reds and the whites,
He thought,
Were no longer wines but soldiers.
The trees,
All aspens,
Sang of love and Russian nights.
Was Lara the Russian Guinevere?

***

For another view of the jam, see L.L. Barkat’s Ticket to Party.

And Maureen's Tweets of Love at the Masquerade Ball.