delish

i really really love tasty dishes

and i really love tasty food

(Harshita Chaudray, i’m a food lover )

I love ( it )  to the depth and

breadth and height

(Elizabeth Barrett Browning, how do I love thee)

but

not thick brown rice and rice pilau

or mushrooms creamed on toast (!)

(Maya Angelou, the health food diner )

but

one thousand long slimy crocodile tongues

boiled up in the skull of a dead witch for 

20 days and nights with the eyeballs of a lizard

(Roald Dahl, james and the giant peach)

swish

oxtails languish on an earthen dish. Here are

wishbones and pinkies; fingerbowls will absolve

guilt

( Carol Anne Duffy, a healthy meal )

.

i really really love tasty dishes

and i really love tasty food

(Harshita Chaudray, i’m a food lover )

downhill i came, hungry, and yet not

starved

( Edward Thomas, the owl )

i follow the aroma that rose from the kitchen

( Ravinder Kumar Soni, food for death )

ate and ate my fill

yet my mouth waters still

(Christina Rossetti, goblin market )

when i think of all the lollies i licked

and the sherbet dabs i picked

( Pam Ayres, oh, i wish i’d looked after my teeth )

the slime of all my yesterday’s 

rots in the hollow of my skull

and if my stomach would contact

(Sylvia Plath, April 18 )

asked me for a kiss

( Langston Hughes, suicides note )

to perfume the sleep of the dead   ( ….  )

( Sarojini Naidu, in the bazaars of Hyderabad )

oh, 

but

.

what am I to do with this invasion, 

contamination of my pretty (?)

( Marion McCready, two daffodils lying on a window ledge )

spread it on bread

spread it on thick

wash it all down with a cold cup of sick (?)

( source unknown , remembered from school )

never – in Extremity,

it asked a crumb – of me

(Emily Dickinson, hope is the thing with feathers )

but 

i’ll make my point – enough’s enough

( Carol Ann Duffy, boys 3, stanley )

 i repent,

(btw )

to the depth and

breadth and height 

i lament,

(btw)

jam, and jelly; and bread;

are the best of food for me!

( Edward Lear, the quangle wangle’s hat )

.

not a haiku

.

https://www.napowrimo.net

Napowrimo Day 30

the final prompt

write a cento. This is a poem that is made up of lines taken from other poems. If you’d like to dig into an in-depth example, here’s John Ashbery’s cento “The Dong with the Luminous Nose,” and here it is again, fully annotated to show where every line originated. A cento might seem like a complex undertaking – and one that requires you to have umpteen poetry books at your fingertips for reference – but you don’t have to write a long one. And a good way to jump-start the process is to find an online curation of poems about a particular topic (or in a particular style), and then mine the poems for good lines to string together. You might look at the Poetry Foundation’s collection of love poems, or its collection of poems by British romantic poets, or even its surprisingly expansive collection of poems about (American) football.