Octopus

Octopus

In my next life
(assuming I get a vote)
I want to come back boneless
An octopus, or a jellyfish
Lithe, clever – yes, clever! –
I already know what it means
To be underestimated,
Dismissed, thought brainless.
I want to come back salt-slick
Sliding, gliding, buoyant,
Weightless. Un-cage-able.
I’d stare a human in the eye
Grasp a wrist, kiss its salt-sweat skin
With tentacled arms, then slip through
The deep blue
Before heaving a sob
For all they lost when they grew legs
And crawled upon the shore.

Author’s Note

I created today’s featured image using Midjourney. The prompt was “an ossuary that looks like an octopus.” The next morning, just out of idle curiosity, I searched Bing – all I typed was, “Do octopus” and the first thing the AI autocomplete suggested was, “…have bones” I screencapped it for proof:

The answer, of course, is no – but how freaky is it that autocomplete suggests that as the first search right after I prompted Midjourney with “octopus” and “ossuary”? Do people really have to ask that? What octopuses do have is a “beak” made of the same material as the exoskeleton of a crab, and it’s pretty powerful. Undigestible. They know this because they’ve found them in the bellies of whales. So an octopus ossuary would, in fact, just be a pile of shell fragments that once served as the octopus’s jaw. According to Animal Hype, this beak is as sharp as a Swiss Army Knife. Don’t stick your fingers near an octopus’s mouth.

Today’s Poets

Mary Oliver

– America’s best selling poet. Read more here and watch her talk about poetry and read her poems:

Mary Oliver — Listening to the World – YouTube

‘A Thousand Mornings’ With Poet Mary Oliver – YouTube

Wilfred Owen – one of the leading poets of World War I. An interesting movie, streaming on Netflix, is Benediction (film) – Wikipedia. It is biographical in nature, exploring the life of Siegfried Sassoon. It was Sassoon who encouraged Owen in his ambition to write better poetry. A manuscript copy of Owen’s Anthem for Doomed Youth containing Sassoon’s handwritten amendments survives as testimony to the extent of his influence and is currently on display at London’s Imperial War Museum. Read more about Wilfred Owen here.

Arms and the Boy by Wilfred Owen | Poetry Foundation

Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen | Poetry Foundation

April is National Poetry Month. This year marks its 27th year. NaPoWriMo – 30 days of writing poems – is poets’ answer to National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo).

This coincides with the A to Z Blogging Challenge, now celebrating its 13th anniversary. Some participants choose a theme; others wing it. Doesn’t matter! The real challenge is to build a practice of writing daily. I think I stuck with it…once. You can see the list of participants – I’m sure they’d love it if you’d visit and comment on their blogs.

This month, my goal is to:

1. Write a poem a day and share it – uncurated – here; and
2. Highlight some poets you may be unfamiliar with.

I encourage you to click the links to read about them and their work. I plan to choose a diverse array of classical and contemporary poets – indigenous poets, Black poets, women poets, LGBTQ poets – that challenge us to see the world differently while also tapping into universal themes and emotions.

Remember, too, that comments and conversation are always welcome here. (Spammers, on the other hand, will be tossed into the moat or mocked, so before you leave an irrelevant comment or drop a link, consider that it’s fair game!)