Monday Poetry Train #40

Joy Splashed
by Joy Renee

______________________________________One
_________________________________  spring
_______________________afternoon at Seaside,
__________________Oregon, while walking
_______________barefoot upon damp sand
_____________at the edge of a rising tide,
___________dabbling my toes in timid
________wavelets and kicking liquid
______diamonds at purple-tongued
____Tia, who distributed them freely
___with shakes of her shaggy mane,
__I looked up to watch clouds cavorting
__over cyan clearings dodging the tickling
__fingers of shadow and light and gulls performing
_their errant air-ballet upon the fickle breezes. While my
gaze was thus engaged, the sea embraced me round my ribs with
salty ecstasy, lifting me for one eternal instant out of the grip of gravity.

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This is hot off the keyboard again and I'm probably not finished playing with the line for mating. The concept of the shaped poem has me fascinated since I read the verse novels of Ellen Hopkins which I introduced on Poetry Train a few weeks ago. Two weeks ago I presented my first attempt at one, a poem about a reading lamp that I shaped like a light bulb. That shape was easy as all it required for formatting was using the centering tag.

This one was trickier. Anyone familiar with Blogger knows that it hates white space. Extra spaces, whether between words or before, after or between lines are nearly always eliminated upon publishing. Actually I've encountered that problem in other WYSIWYG. Sometimes using a table can help. Especially if you want to center a poem under the title while keeping the left justified. For the method I used here I did not need a table. You can see what I did by highlighting it.

I wrote the draft as a regular block of prose and fiddled with the word choice and phrasing, punctuation and story line until I was happy with it before I started shaping it. It is a retelling of the story I told a couple weeks ago about the moment this picture was taken of me in the late spring or early summer of 1995.