A Star Once Brazen Now Grown Ashen
A Star Once Brazen Now Grown Ashen
“Skyward” Bardic Poetry by Joseph S. Plum
Welcome:
Greetings and welcome to American Bardic Poet.
“Skyward”
It’s hard not to have favorites. I do. And this is one of my favorite poems. I love to recite these lines aloud. The way the words fall, one after the other…
I love it when the poet creates metaphoric poems like this one. So unique. It speaks to the heart of anyone who has endured a winter illness and looked out the window.
Good journey,
(The poet’s daughter.)
skyward
raven-tongued,
back bent skyward,
sudden illness
come morning.
a small sun rises
beneath great hills,
clouds that would billow,
a star once brazen
now grown ashen
to be swallowed by
swirling mountains above.
two crows, black flying black,
dip, decide to touch land,
walk, heads bent, to inspect
this distant window.
drifting. no anchor. no bounds.
small sounds stir,
blanketed in warmth,
still, chills run to perch
near the tips of a hand.
talk travels soft,
sinks deep into the heart
where beneath roof board ribs
of this quiet house,
all day with the wind
walls shake.
Read about the poet and the bees here.
Read my post regarding the punctuation and editing of the poems here.
Read the poem, “The Sun Has Traveled Well” here.
This is a page from the book, I Believe in Seeds: Affirmations for Rewilding, made possible by a grant from the BeWildReWild Fund at Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation. This book combines my watercolor paintings with Dad’s poems, and gave me a chance to try something different with punctuation. Also, it was such a beautiful moment when Dad saw my paintings and realized his poems were part of his daughter’s artwork.
I’m grateful.
I’ll write more next week. Hope to see you again then. Please consider sharing this post with someone you think may be interested in Dad’s poetry.
🙏🏼 Thank you for gathering here. May it be a blessing. 🙏🏼
About the Poet
Joseph S. Plum is a poet in the bardic tradition. He lives off-grid in rural Iowa and composes his unique chant-like oral poetry for fascinated audiences around the world. Joe has over 16 hours of oral poetry memorized in his head. He pulls from this collection of rhyming lines to compose poems according to the energy of the audience listening. Joe does all of this without writing the poems down on paper or holding any notes.
Joe’s daughter, Emily Lupita, typed up his poems over the years and launched Dreaming Deer Press to publish his work. He now has nine poetry books for sale on Amazon that can be purchased on Joe’s website - here.
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