Mary Franklin

Work-in-Progress

 

Begin your day like a game of Scrabble

you set up say on a weekend morning

to play with a partner or a friend. 

Focus on words, words, words

not concerns that can lead to bafflement.

 

For who knows why and when a word

that has lain fallow will somehow find a way

to enter a chamber of your brain and remain.

Let it take refuge there.  Leave it alone.

One day it may morph into a poem. 

 

James Murray and fellow lexicographers

of the Oxford English Dictionary deemed

meanings of words work-in-progress.

Calls for definitions resulted in thousands

of postcards from around the world.

 

Begin your day like a game of Scrabble.

Consider each word you create one by one.

Taste it.  Hold it up to the light.  Does it glow?

What does it feel like?  What does it say?

Get by word by word.  Take it slow.

 

Brown Boots

 

A hushed dusk . . .

 

cherry blossoms in bloom and then I find 

your old brown boots in the garden shed.

 

You always said procrastination was a killer –

that would rank me somewhere near serial

 

so tonight I tied them together by their laces

took them to the foot of your grave and placed

 

daffodils in them.  I’ll go back Sunday

and see if the wind has blown them away.

 

‘Brown Boots’ was first published at Message in a Bottle, Issue 23, December 2014.  

 

 

Mary Franklin’s poems have appeared in numerous print and online journals including Anthropocene, Hobo Camp Review, Ink Sweat and Tears, Iota, London Grip, The Open Mouse and Three Drops from a Cauldron.  She lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.