Category: daily worku

STOKE naturally wants something already alive—a fire, anger, desire, resistance—and today’s poems exploit that beautifully. Diana’s first poem is a particularly strong lesson in presence: creak, twig, howl, then the immediate decision to add another log. Nothing is explained because we’re too busy being there. Her Linked Worku stretches that same technique across two poems, moving from a spike in a dark road to a makeshift fire and one ominous “Wait…” Elsewhere, STOKE fuels corporate scandal, inner calm, primitive fire, anger, and resistance. A good target word can finish a poem; STOKE often makes something inside the poem keep burning.

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This week’s theme is presence, and PAGER turns out to be almost perfectly designed to disrupt it. Debbie gives us perhaps the quietest example: two people settled together with their books until a vibration enters the room. Diana and Paulette interrupt a theatrical moment with an ill-timed page, while auntie jj lets inspiration arrive only to be pinged again. Across the set, the pager keeps asking the same question: where is your attention now? Sometimes presence becomes easiest to see at the exact moment something steals it.

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SHONE gives this group a useful contrast between brightness and whatever threatens it: aging teeth, grit in a scone, tears, dubious triumphs, and even a replacement tooth that shines briefly before breaking again. The Mick/Robo collaboration shows the quieter, haiku-like route, placing the unpleasant crunch of stone beside warm sunlight that continues unaffected. Diana and Lari bring this week’s movement theme directly into the action—a floating hat, a shove, a Radio Flyer—while Debbie moves emotionally from comedy into memory. And Mick’s second poem takes movement literally and figuratively: forge ahead, make the replacement, watch it shine—and then start over when it breaks.

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WAKEN naturally gives a poem movement even when nobody physically goes anywhere. Today the motion is often a change of state: Debbie’s dull mind begins to stir, Robo crosses the boundary from a waxen dream landscape into waking, Mark activates yeast, and Mick waits for a caned night to loosen its grip. Robo’s poem is a particularly clean example of a haiku-like turn—the first two lines let us inhabit the dream, then “But now I WAKEN” closes the door on it. This week’s movement theme can be bodily, but today reminds us that waking itself is a journey.

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SNOWY gives this round an immediate landscape, but the more interesting question is what the poets make move inside it. Diana’s poem does something especially neat with this week’s movement theme by taking movement away: “SNOWY roads cut off” suddenly explains the frantic cupboard search and traps the poem in place. Debbie moves in the opposite direction, drawing someone physically closer toward safety from the snowy night. Elsewhere we get falling stones, beach excursions, restless survival, and some unapologetic zappai weirdness. A movement poem doesn’t always have to travel very far—sometimes stopping the road is enough.

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