Five Tiny Doves (Oni Buchanan)

I started to go to my poetry workshop again a few months ago. It's good for me, I think, to have a creative bent again. I'm also especially busy this week, so in homage to the adage [see what I did there :)] of the busiest man having the most time I've decided to restart my RTP blog. Wish me luck going forward!

Today's poem is the poem o' the day on Poetry Daily. By Oni Buchanan (bet no one else shares her name!), the poem "Five Tiny Doves" is about life/death and the sea and attentiveness and details and sensitivity and seeing and hearing, observing all.

That's what I get from the poem, at least. A fish craft and a death blow, yes, but the poem is more so concerned with all the details to be found on the boat and in the sea and in the creatures of the sea.

I should write a poem like this - pick a scene and describe. I bet Oni started with a fishing boat, but then kept finding more and more detail to write about. She starts with the boat and with a person on the boat, but then goes to the very visible school of silver fish to the not-so-easily-observed sounds of a sea slug and ends with the near-impossible-to-root-out doves in a sand dollar (if such things even exist).

I love her journey of observing. A poem, too, is like that, I think. You start with the obvious - the title or a flashy image, but you keep looking at it and it starts to divulge more of itself (or you see things not quite there - doves in a starfish, eh?).

"How much more can I ignore?" - The N in the poem questions as if chiding herself for her not noticing. Me too: How can I have ignored the ants in my front lawn this morning? How can I be so oblivious to so much action and natural beauty? How many more poems can I ignore? Thank you, today's poem, for posing the question and making me resolute to keep reading and seeing and posting.

 Favorite line: "It was clear she had carefully considered"