Today is the last session of 2020’s Marathon. As I mentioned recently, I won’t be continuing with the Marathon activity in 2021. I will still be writing, but it’s time to close the door on these weekly sessions.

You may remember that sometimes I have used random phrases glued on library check-out cards as inspirations.

Once I have finished with them, I usually turn them into colorful versions of themselves. It’s just for fun, no theme or reason behind it, just fun. I’ll be using them as illustrations throughout this post.

Today’s works are all based on a common theme. Now, this is not something I have ever done before, but for whatever reason, I did it today. And what is that theme. It is — CAKE. Yes, cake.

I’m going to feature all the poems I did today. They are all short. There aren’t too many of them.

And, after all, today is the last Marathon day. Let’s let everyone have their say. So, here goes.

A poem about cake.

1.
Cake One

so many eggs
too thick in the bowl
sugar very thin
a marked flavor of
too much disappointment
I mark the recipe on the page:
Never make this cake again
you might as well eat grass

Another poem about cake.

2.
Cake Two

very light in the mixing bowl
nice and shiny wraps like a dream
Loves the oven and shows it
The bottom crisps
The interior floats
A delicious package this cake:
postmarked and delivered
to your plate
Perfect.

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A shadorma about cake.

3.
your pour it
with some symmetry
sticky sauce
fighting back
a crown of uneven drips
results. The cake sighs.

A tanka about cake.

4.
scraping the paper
the short stub of a pencil
lists ingredients
for the traditional cake
in your grandmother’s writing

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A tanka about cake.

5.
Sliced thin and sunburned
picnic cake slumps on its plate
oozing pink icing.
Flies inspect it. Reject it.
A passing bird shits on it.

A shadorma about cake.

6.
My prom dress –
Pink checked cotton cake
Red grosgrain
ribbon loops
Three linen rosettes smack dab
on my butt. Nice, huh?

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A shadorma about cake.

7.
Aqua glass
mixing bowl. Biggest
in the set.
Pink frosting
fills it to the top. The cake
tries not to worry.

*******

Now we have come to the end. Before I leave, I will show you one more image. It’s a large painting I did in June 2020. We had been at home in lockdown for almost 90 days. I felt despair and fear. I turned to my artwork, as I have so often before, to help me find a way to express my feelings.

This painting includes all the elements that matter to me in it: my home, my family, my friends, my belief that my life and my work has purpose. It’s called “I Hope”.

After I finished it, I heard of an online exhibit open to Pennsylvania residents sponsored by Penn State called Viral Imaginations. I submitted it to the exhibit with the idea that in a small way, my voice could be heard, and maybe someone else might find something in the images that symbolize to me what is important in my life.

I have a small granddaughter born this summer. I have never seen her in person and I don’t know when I will. She has come into a world that I often don’t recognize, and yet so many things are still present – friendship, family, art, writing, home. I have hope that her life will be lived in a good world.

I hope. I hope. I hope.

*******

I have felt so much support from all of you during these years I have been doing the Marathon. I will end here with my heartfelt Thank You to all of you. And my best wishes for all of you for continued good health and good spirits.

This week I worked on poems that started off as phrases or sentences that I picked up here or there. I have been writing down 5-syllable phrases for a while and some poems started off with items from that list.

A couple of others that I did were derived from the autocorrect function of my phone. Try it:

• Type in a word, keep it.
• Type another one and select from the auto options.
• Keep going, filling in words of your own as you feel like it. Later, when you revisit the “poem”, you can polish it into a shape, I guarantee it.

All right. Before we get going, I will show you scenes of my basement re-do project. As I said in earlier weeks, since I don’t go out to do the Marathon anymore, I have no photos from the sites to show you. So, my basement project has been standing in.

Things are pretty much finished. I need to paint the steps into the room. I will do that after my husband does some minor repairs to a door frame. Otherwise, the room is as it will be. I had decided to move my painting/”messy” artwork set-up into this room. We are re-doing my upstairs studio area and putting in a new floor there. That room will be my desk area/clean art room now.

These changes came about since my husband is permanently working from home and the functions of the rooms needed to be amended to make things more comfortable for us.

Take a look. Here is a view from the steps:

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Here is my husband’s beautifully-organized tool storage area:

And here are a couple of shots of the art area. I think the only thing I am now waiting for is a task lighting lamp I have ordered, for the work table. And I plan to hang some of my paintings on the walls, but that is for later. Right now I am enjoying the clean look the room has.

All right, let’s get to poems.

This is one of those phone poems.

The Question is Pestering Me

Why’d we have to get a little more comfortable
Ho’d we limber up our stiff joints
to habituate our shapes to the armchair
settle heavy into the cushions
circular in form
like cats
Why’d we do that
and us not even having the explanation of
actually being cats
Yes
why did we?

It got so comfortable so fast.
Everyone said
we hadn’t planned for
the boredom
though
to be honest
it never came along.

When exactly was it? when
we understood
what we are is

We are cats.

Two haiku about love. I think. The phrases that inspired the poems were “it can be arranged” and “a romantic man”.

6b.
it can be arranged –
a pint of ripe strawberries
a love triangle

6c.
a romantic man
like many others he writes
awkward poetry

I have been sewing – clothing, toys, quilts, curtains, pillows – you name it – for about 55 years. My mother was an accomplished seamstress and I learned from her. The pinking shears were, and still are, my favorite scissors. I love the cut they make and the sound of the fabric as it goes into the blades. Yes, it is a different sound than a pair of straight shears makes.

Anyway, to me, the sight of a pinked edge is very pleasant. In my childhood, before I learned to sew myself or could use these scissors, I had a prized collection of small fabric scraps cut with pinking shears, gleaned from the floor of the sewing room.

Now you know the background of this haiku. “Pinking shears” was the original phrase.

5.
pinking shears snip snick
serrated edges part ways
the floor claims the scraps

Thank you for reading!

This week I continued working over my list of collected phrases and making short form poems out of them (or the ideas they bring up. I’m enjoying the process.

I’ve been showing you photos of my basement project progress but I forgot to take any this morning while I was painting a couple of doors. Rest assured it is progressing. I think by next week you may be very surprised to see it…finished???

Instead, I will show you some photos of the full moon I saw early this morning before the sun came up. And I will give you a few examples of poetry work, too.

A haiku. The phrase was “something aggressive”. I have been seeing a lot of hawks in the air in the last couple of days, and this is what made me think of this image.

10.
something aggressive
the hawk has been thinking and
the rabbit has not.

This shadorma chain came from an experience I had a couple of weeks ago. My husband and I go out early in the morning to walk or run – it is dark when we leave and as the winter draws in, it is still dark on the trail for a while (though we have headlamps). Anyway, I heard an owl hoot in the darkness – the sound carried in the silence all through the trees, so that I could not even tell from what direction it came.

12.
twice the owl
in the far-off said
something I
heard it loud
in the darkness but no more
again that morning

as daylight
dragged itself awake
not that day
not ever.
That I heard him speak I know
it was not to me.

This tanka started off with “decorous toothbrush”. I’ve mixed memories here – a green bathroom we had in our previous house, and how the comb felt as my mother raked it hard against my scalp to part my hair when I was young.

5.
decorous toothbrush
lazy hairbrush snappish comb
familiar voices
bounce off green tiled walls. The world
is a five by eight bathroom.

Here is a photo from Norristown Farm Park from last week. It’s the Dairy Barn complex across the field of now harvested soybeans.

I show it to you because it is calm and peace-giving, and seems like a nice image to leave you with here. Thank you for reading.

I know this week will be full of drama. There will be little space in my mind for poetry, I think. I got busy today to make sure I would accomplish this week’s session.

It was a chilly and very blustery day, with strong wind gusts blowing away the remnants of the heavy rain we have had for the last couple of days.

Leaves are leaving the trees quickly. These trees are in my back yard.

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I had a variety of subjects I worked on today – I had saved some ideas up from last week. And I work under the eyes of these two entities – they are garden statues in my back yard and I can see them right outside my window.

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They are always silent, keeping their thoughts to themselves. Not like me, I guess. Anyway, let’s get going. Here are a couple of items from today.

This haiku is not seasonal, at least, not for this season.

6.
The messy pleasures
of top-heavy ice cream cones
and hot afternoons

My husband and I visited a local museum yesterday afternoon, viewing an exhibit of abstract paintings from the 1950’s. I like abstract work (I guess I’d better since I also do it myself), but we found these a bit pretentious and to be honest, kind of boring. I think there is sometimes a lot of intellectualizing of an artwork that attempts to inflate an image of modest impact into a larger one. Or maybe I just didn’t get what was going on. But I have decided I’m going to go with my own impressions. That’s what this poem is about. What I thought.

4.
the painting
is quite zero for keeping the eye
occupied
owes a large apology to
the color red
is framed very nicely.
Its self-esteem
relies not so much on
a visual understanding with a viewer
as a series of numbers you both comprehend.
You find the whole package
seductive
hypnotic
and you obey the urge.
Your credit card please.

I guess this shadorma runs along the same lines, except that the subject is words. I do have my nerve, it seems, ready to judge just about anything. Once again, no apologies. After all, what that also means is, you can think what you like about my art or writing, too, right? Although I hope you’ll be kind in how you make your observations where I can hear them…

3.
His new book
like a haiku of
quite lovely
but zero
sense-making strings of words that
got lost and gave up

*******

OK, that is it for today. I’ll show you something I saw in my yard as I went into the house after taking the above photos:

At the base of the post is part of a paper wasp nest. I love to find these structures and to look at them in detail. There is no doubt in my mind as to the wasps’ skill or the beauty they have created.