Poesy

Making Poetry

Village Sunrise Debbie Ross

I’ve finally worked out how to add my poetry to another section of my publication, without it being a page. Hooray! The downside is you may be automatically signed up to receive my poetry as well as my articles. If you’d rather do without the poetry, simply decline to receive the emails, but don’t unsubscribe from ‘All Kinds of Everything’ or you won’t receive anything at all (unless of course that’s your intention!)

I’ve been writing poetry for over 50 years. Not necessarily good poetry (whatever that is) but consistently. In my early 20’s I had some success in competitions, magazines and a few anthologies, but I became disillusioned with the whole merry-go-round and stopped my subscriptions, stopped entering competitions, stopped submitting to publications. I never stopped writing poetry however, or reading it. I have hundreds of poetry books and they’ve sustained me when I’ve been distracted, distraught, unwell, or busy; when concentrating on a whole book has been too hard.

Over the last few years I’ve been more actively involved with some on-line groups:the Scottish Highlands and Islands Poetry Society (SHIPS) TopTweetTuesday and #Prompt Combo on Twitter and #PoemsAbout now on Bluesky. I’m very grateful for the positivity and encouragement of these bunches of poetry people and for the help and inspiration from small press helmsmen Matthew C Smith and Alan Parry. At a time when I can’t afford to buy journals my involvement with these on-line poetry communities has been wholly positive. Poets are fundamentally nice people, I think.

My confidence in myself and my abilities has been at an all time low recently, for various reasons, but I made a plan this year to write in a more disciplined and organised way and part of that plan was to hone and submit work to various places. So far I’ve submitted to 2 journals and 3 anthologies and have had 3 acceptances. To say I’m delighted would be an understatement. I’m feeling the creep of imposter syndrome - surely someone made a mistake? I look at all the amazing, clever, deep poetry that is shared each week in these communities and wonder how my simple work managed to make the cut. I won’t think about it too much. I’m grateful that the curators consider my work fits the bill on this occasion.

I write a lot of poetry - over 200 poems last year - and with the best will in the world not all of that will find a publication home, so my intention here is to share some of my output and hope that it resonates with some of my readers and maybe attracts some new ones.

This first poem was shared this week as part of the Broken Spine Arts #PoemsAbout #Dawn prompt and was re-worked from a previous poem. I hope you like it.

Dawning

Early light -
imperceptible at first -
breaks through
grey clouds.
The sky blushes
powder puff pink 
with hints of Peach Bellini,
silhouettes
budding trees
and the dawn chorus crew.
The sun orchestrating light
like a symphony,
warming
to its theme 
of daybreak.