Welcome
A Words with Friends poem
Last month, an old friend invited me on an impromptu trip to North Carolina’s Emerald Isle, where her sister lived. It was last minute, and I’m grateful my supervisor let me take the time. I didn’t know how much I needed that vacation until all the pent-up air left in a big exhale when I saw the Bogue Sound.
Every time I take a vacation, I write a constraint vacation poem. I ask my Facebook friends to supply one word each, which I then use to write a poem, employing just one of the given words in each line.
Usually, I hide my post after about 24 words (the perfect poem length—24 lines, don’t you think?), but I forgot and wound up with 43 words. Ugh, a long poem.
I rarely disqualify words, but someone supplied my least favorite, ointment, and I’d already used that hideous thing in the last Words with Friends poem. I also discarded scatological; I don’t write shit poems. Finally, to make it even, I nudged zhuzh off the list. Maybe I’ll pick that one up next time.
It took me a few weeks to finish the poem I made with those 40 words. I started the opening set of three iambic pentameter stanzas in North Carolina, but it was too sweet. After a day at Shackleford Banks, I knew the tone shift I needed to make.
I ran into the water to retrieve a whelk shell because it was huge and seemed to bob on the gentle waves and beg me to notice it. I knew it would be gnarly, but once I touched it, I knew a kindred spirit lived inside.
Why was I looking for the kind of shell you could buy in any souvenir shop anyway? Who needs a perfect specimen, when you can’t tell whether it was bought or found? I wanted something special, something that looked like it had lived a life, like me.
Without these particular 40 words, I might have written a better poem. But the truth is I wouldn’t have written any poem.
I’ll share the poem first (written in iambic pentameter and hexameter), and then I’ll share the words.
Welcome
Is nothing sacred but the beach: the birds—
those laughing gulls; the seashells, water-worn;
the hollow spiral of a whelk that plays
the ocean’s music softly in your ear?
A beach beseeches, and you heed its call:
The urgent sacred light of dawn and dusk,
a sea that froths and shimmers with each wave—
ironic violent surf that calms the soul.
The verdant forest’s sacred, too, a gem
embedded in a lucid blue, and what’s
to do but lollygag in dreamland, day
and night, a friend and dogs in tow?
----
We take a ferry to an isle that’s stocked with whelk
and wild horses, grateful for a vast expanse
of shoreline, water celadon and crystal clear.
We sift among the bountiful array of shells
but never catch perfection’s glimpse, just weather-worn
and gnarly specimens like us, a shadow of
their younger selves: catch and release, release and catch.
But I am growing fonder of this plethora:
menagerie of color, shape, and size; chunks
of patterned tiles, a scandal of discarded wealth.
Like me. I’m flippant for the moment that it lasts
and realize a giant spectral whelk has washed
up near my feet, and perspicacious, I see me:
Frenetic youth and storied life with much to tell.
I start to write the tale while slipping in my tote
this crusty lotto prize, embarrassed, I admit,
by maudlin souvenirs—enough to weigh me down
were I to, Woolf-like, walk into the tame green sound.
I like to think I’d drop the bag, emerge refreshed
on Emerald Isle, inspired by the botany,
the ornithology; the least sandpiper calls.
I stay alive to bask in more sun-dappled days.
(Who knows if you’ll be flourishing or languishing.)
For solitude, I slip into myself, at once a place
of peace and strife, floriferous with budding bright
and dark ideas, level field for yin and yang,
the sweet and tart, the head and heart: a balance struck.
And here are the words, with their contributors’ names in parens.
Sacred (Gretchen K)
Gulls (Megg M)
Spiral (Linda B)
Softly (Doug S)
Beseech (Rich K)
Light (Susan G)
Shimmery (Carol H)
Calm (Sarah M)
Verdant (Jodi M)
Lucid (Lisa L)
Lollygag (Heidi Y)
Friend (Joy M)
Stock (Susan G.)
Grateful (Jill S, Lorraine W)
Celadon (Jody S)
Bountiful (Lexa F)
Glimpse (Ellen K)
Shadow (Jane T)
Release (Kurt H)
Plethora (Karen S.)
Menagerie (Aliza W)
Scandal (Charles R)
Flippant (Kristi L)
Spectral (Anne C)
Perspicacious (Elizabeth M)
Frenetic (Sharon M)
Slipping (Robin W)
Lotto (Maya A)
Maudlin (Todd B.)
Tame (Erica B)
Refreshed (April K)
Dappled (Aziza D)
Flourishing (Belinda B)
Worrisome (Beth VB)
Solitude (Nicole E)
Floriferous (Pam G.)
Level (Gail D)
Tart (Dawn R)
Inspire (Sharon G)
Ornithology (Tom K)
Thanks for reading! Please let me know what you think.
💙💙💙
"a whelk that plays
the ocean’s music softly"
I see what you did there.