Search Engine Poetry

???????????????????????????????

orange worm in mandarin

bluebee militant

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people’s shadows

picture of non living things never alive

????????????????????????????????????????

what is hoohoooo

Richard Dawkins

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large hadron collider

subatomic beauty

?????????????????????

People look up some weird stuff, don’t they? (Just ask Tilly :))

So, a fun challenge for you this weekend – in the tradition of  Book Spine Poetry, create a Search Engine Poem of your own (or an artwork, Benedicte and Renee),  send me the link and we’ll have a vote on the weirdest and wackiest at the end of  the weekend.

To see all the search engine terms that found your blog in the last 30 days, go to Stats > Search Engine Terms > Summaries > 30 Days

PS –  how would one say  “orange worm” in Mandarin? The Good Greatsby, can you perhaps enlighten us? 🙂

Weekly Photo Challenge: Solitary

The wreck of the MV Sygna – Stockton Beach, NSW, Australia

What happiness is there for those who lead a solitary life through no choice of their own?

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For more entries to this week’s photo challenge, see The Daily Post at WordPress.com

Weekly Photo Challenge: Everyday Life

Early morning swimmers – Bronte Beach Baths, Sydney
©beeblu

Our quotidian rituals

bring discipline,

structure

and joy

to our hours;

they are the anchors

of our existence.

****************

For more entries to this week’s photo challenge, see The Daily Post at WordPress.com

Pedestrian

For a moment,
they bob,

these dull black balloons,

tethered to the traffic lights
in stringtime contemplation,

hermetic thoughts
jostle and tangle,
in colourless mirror-image
inscrutability,

safe
to dream themselves red-hot
airships unleashed,

cerulean adventures
aloft a blue-moon day.

xxxxxxx

Wonderfully talented photographer Madelaine Cappuccio has teamed my poem ‘Pedestrian’ with one of her beautiful balloon photos over at her blog, Images by Madelaine Cappuccio.

Thanks, Madelaine 😀

Feeding Time on the Golf Course

“I think I spy a worm…

“Got it!” 

“Pssst, Horace, I think we’re being watched.”

“Oh for goodness sake, Edith, stop imagining things and eat your dinner…” 

“Mmm…I think I spy a plumper morsel over there…”

“nom, nom”

Click here for the Animal Olympics

Weekly Photo Challenge: Purple

Never trust a woman who wears mauve, whatever her age may be, or a woman over thirty-five who is fond of pink ribbons. It always means they have a history.
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891

For more entries to this week’s photo challenge, see The Daily Post at WordPress.com

The Same By Any Other Name

Names of affection,
(Little Eddie, Sweet Baboo)

projection and deflection,
(Camille, Flame, Agapanthus)

colours and food,
(Pumpkin, Bean, Red, Blu)

some, unmentionably rude 😉

****************************

Prompted by this post at Go Jules Go

Weekly Photo Challenge: Inside

Trapped inside a system of prejudice

South African Pass Laws

Yellow Badge

Palestinian Freedom of Movement

The Stolen Generations

Jim Crow Laws

Judenhut

Ethnic Cleansing

A re-posted poem –

Death Cap

Iniquity, depravity
crimes against humanity.

Conflagration, radiation,
man made this abomination.

Enormity, deformity,
war’s enduring legacy.

Experimentation, humiliation –
Who needs victim’s approbation?

Cessation, condemnation?
War has no such aspiration.

Obliteration, extermination,
then,
our final destination.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

For more entries to this week’s photo challenge, see The Daily Post at WordPress.com

Weekly Photo Challenge: Dreaming

For me, dreaming is about possibilities, and none so wonderful as those brought by travel.

I became a xenophile at around the time I started school, and dreamt of going to live in exotic places, mostly Japan and rural China, and of flying off to wonderful cities, such as London, Tokyo,  Amsterdam and Marrakech. Years on, and living in a different country, I’m grateful that I’ve been fortunate enough to travel to many parts of the world, and to have experienced incredible adventures and fascinating cultures as a result.

And the dreaming continues – I’ve yet to get to Japan or China 😀

To dream is to travel: to travel is to realize a dream

On these themes, a re-post of a poem I wrote a while ago –

Dreams of a Love Gourmand

He ate Suzi’s paella

and dreamed of Impanema,

of romance in Marbella

and Rio de Janeiro

He ate Fleur’s rindless blue,

his dreams were psychedelia,

he dreamt he was Theroux,

da Vinci and Ophelia

He drank Ping’s green absinthe

and dreamt he was a fairy

with eyes as green as minthe,

his wand, a blue canary

He ate Fang’s chou dofu,

her durian, then balut,

and napped as King Shi Chu

at war with King Canute

He ate Ann’s cherry duck,

nightmared of Gordon Ramsay,

who served confit of muck

with jus of some philandery

Then came Maeve’s Irish Stew,

no dreams his sleep disturbed

and as he woke he knew

his food of love’d been served

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And for the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, Dreaming has a very special meaning – it encompasses beliefs about the origins of the earth, the stars and all living things, and the connections that exist between them, and is brought alive in wonderful stories, art and music. You can read more about the Dreaming and the Dreamtime here.

For more entries to this week’s photo challenge, see The Daily Post at WordPress.com

HooHoooo (or, as they say in French, Hou Hou) – for Gabrielle Bryden and Bénédicte Delachanal

A poem for friends Gabrielle Bryden (sublime poet and lover of owls), who is currently fighting the dreaded winter lurgy,
and
Bénédicte Delachanal (fabulous artist), who crafted these wonderfully funky owl paintings.

 The Comfort of Owls

From tsunami dreams
We bolt upright
And heart and breath
Race to the death
To drown out silence
Of dead hours
And throw us wide-eyed
To the night.

Then, faint, through darkness
Comes strange calm
To tension-wired
Synapse and bone,
The ebb and flow
Of delta waves,
Like a mother’s kiss,
Floats softly down
In owl’s low call,
Primal and deep,
Submersing us
In tides of sleep.

xx

For more things owl, check out Owls on WordPress and YouTube.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Fleeting Moment

The fleeting moment is epitomized in street photography – frames of an unchoreographed ballet of movement, expression, interaction and unguarded moments.

But street photography is also an ethical minefield; sometimes people seem comfortable with being photographed, but often, not so, as appears to be the case in the photo below, judging by the firemen’s expressions.

I suspect that these men are resigned to being constantly photographed by strangers, given the location, the nature of their work and the tributes painted on their fire engine. But perhaps they’re also disgusted by the whole disaster-tourism aspect of it.

What do you think?

Are you comfortable with being photographed in public places by strangers? If someone that you had photographed in the street voiced their objection, what would you do?

–x–

For more entries to this week’s photo challenge, see The Daily Post at WordPress.com

Weekly Photo Challenge: Create

Michaela Johanna Gräper at work

Sculpture-in-progress – Michaela Johanna Gräper

We spent the Easter long weekend in Thredbo, and because I couldn’t do my usual frenetic mountain walking due to my feet issues, on the Sunday, us girls left the boys to catch our dinner from the mountain streams and headed into Jindabyne for a bit of laidback arts rambling.

We stopped in at the Wild Brumby Distillery to watch the advertised sculptor-in-residence at work: Michaela Johanna Gräper. Meeting her was rather a lot like observing her create her deliciously voluptuous ladies from these huge wooden logs – at first, we found her extremely reserved and inscrutable like the raw material of her craft, but once she got talking were completely delighted by her utterly wicked sense of humour which is also revealed in her plumpilcious creations – with an impish grin, she confided that most of them are modelled on her on own naked form.

Michaela travels the world on her creative talents – what better life is there?

As for mine, well, they’re non-existent – I once went to a figure-drawing class and came home with this…

Figures? by bb


(PS – And if you’re wondering, Easter Sunday in Thredbo, we ate out for dinner ;-))

See the Daily Post for more entries to the Weekly Photo Challenge: Create

Dilettantes of Disaster

The shadows draw long
through our limbs,
impoverished pulses from
indolent
hearts carve us
tragic sinkhole
s for eyes
; we are sallow
spectres in the night
mirror, painting ourselves
in dishwater tincture
for dream-time, a sludge palette
of effete sorrow.

Until abstraction
manifests from the canvas
and chokes us by the throat,
we do not know gratitude.