Writing Prompt #3: We Recognize Heartbreak

[Open Heart Project]

Write a poem about what it feels like to have a broken heart. It can be an epic, a haiku, an ode, a shriek. If you doubt your ability to create poetry, borrow favorite phrases from 3-5 writers (about anything) and weave them into a poem about yourself.

[Tracy Serros]

I definitely doubt my ability to create poetry… but this is what came to me.

What is heartbreak?
Giving up hope of things being different
A loss of innocence (a recovery of innocence?)
Exquisite pain
Total surrender
Breaking inside and
breaking through

[Mia Brice]

Heartbreak

Finding my ceramic mug with the orange snake carved into the handle
Thought it’d been stolen by my stepdaughter, Karma
Forgot I’d hid it in the pantry long ago
Keeping her from taking and breaking another of my treasures
All this time, empty, holding only my rage in a dark place

• This reply was modified 2 days, 13 hours ago by Mia Brice.

[Suzanne Hunt]

Cut wide open and agape, a
cold unbroken landscape
is vacant with no escape.
Raw.
I turn away from this unwanted fate
But the path follows me, having no grace.
The unwelcome
continues to stare me in the face.

All at once, the drowning waves crash in,
tossing, spinning, churning,
And just as breath is expiring,
They recede back into the whole.
The anguish consumes all that it touches
Cleansing, purging, tormenting my soul,
toward the everlasting quiet.

[Betsy Loeb]

This is Just to Say…*

You invited me into your bedroom
And rather than finding an invitation to play
I opened the door
And, stuffed animals fell on my head.

I decided to reciprocate your love
I printed your name on Mama’s piano
She never dreamed it was done by her sweet Betsy
But that mischievous boy named Henry is at it again.

You continued on … you said
“You’ll flunk out of college by semester’s end”.
I retaliated by staying til the end.

Unfortunately there’s more to be told,
But we’re both getting much too old.
I love you deeply from my Broken Heart.

*
“Mistakes Were Made” by William Carlos Williams, 1934
I heard the above today on This American Life podcast.
Following the reading of his poem, many others shared
their poems inspired from his.

[Mari Border]

If i open my eyes the savagery, the in sanity, the cruelty is everywhere
but then close them quickly
quickly as I can
pray to not be wrecked all day long
to not cry of the despair
to remember there us beauty, love, kindness
and cats.
I can hold both truths at the same time
The bitter sweetness of the broken heart
Like a quiet friend.

[Lauren Lesser]

It rains so hard and does not stop
Until the shell disolves and washes away
Leaving me with the pain that has followed me for years
And plead with me to enter it’s journey
Now, in it’s presence, it is terrible and beautiful
And inexplicably kind
We are going somewhere

[Suzanne Hunt]

Lovely

[Naomi Brining]

we did not plan for this day
we never do

we watch the days go by as if they will never
run out

Our life together begins with me as me and you
as you

Then we dance the dance of life, now me as you
and you a cloud

And at this crossroads of where you are
or are not

Is still the deepest yearning inside
my heart

[Michelle Brown]

Brokenhearted feels like clear running brook
with light shining through
Dancing sun rays.
If feels like knowing the thing has passed by
The missed opportunity to connect with a daughter, a sister
About a thing important. Past.
It feels like the ungraspable cold rush of the brook gone by.
The held pleasure of it. On skin. In hand: Cooling, soothing
The knowledge we didn’t.
It is both, heartbreak
Pain. Pleasure. The pleasure itself in knowing I am alive.

[Suzanne Hunt]

Deeply held heartbreak. I felt it

[Felice Lopez]

if only i was someone else & you were too
this wouldn’t have happened
can’t i be someone else?
i can’t be in this skin
i want to shred it off – that would be better than this

[Sue Perry]

Granddaughter is graduating from elementary school.
She is so nervous about being late.
(The school is far, through L.A. traffic.)
Her parents are heroes:
her complicated hairdo, the toddlers who don’t wanna,
it all gets handled with ease and grace.
We’re out the door with so many minutes to spare!
As we settle into the freeway crush,
her father my son realizes.
He forgot the required tickets.
We have to turn around.
Now we’ll be late. Maybe, unbearably late.
I’m riding shotgun and I’m feeling
just how much he wanted to do this right.
Just how wrong her day has gone.
Yet more hurts I can’t protect them from.

[Ana Maria Jomolca]

56 Club

I let the phone ring and ring and ring, then lose my resolve, pick up,
“I love you help me never mind just enough to get through the week how’s Claudio I love you..”

He wants to be someone who matters
To someone who matters.

I love you never mind I love you

It is always the last time.
What does one pack when they are going away forever?

• This reply was modified 1 day, 16 hours ago by Ana Maria Jomolca.

[Felice Lopez]

i thought i’d post another, as my last post seemd more angry

from what we discussed heart break has more tenderness from a place of loss of sweetness

You loved and held me with your eyes
You came and loved me always…. always…
You smiled at me always
You walked with me and loved my feet
And finally you no longer could
i hold your eyes, smiling delight, and sideways amble in my heart, always

[Lin Oakerson]

Heartbreak Haiku

I break my own heart

I’m standing in my shadow

Asking for Blessings

[Anne Dooley]

its’s early
grey light lifts
from wet ground
bird song is close
and loud
a train holler
a truck beep backing up
now the crows
it’s getting noisy in here
all the glass fell from
the windowpanes overnight
a steeper tilt and now
the floorboards slope and peak
loose now
swinging to a different beat
than the doors dangling
from the jambs
once this damn house stops
sliding
i’ll start looking
again, for you

• This reply was modified 1 day, 11 hours ago by Anne Dooley.

[Suzanne Lee]

Knowing no one will save me;
Knowing I don’t know;
Knowing there is no ground, no thing;
Knowing there is only now.
Nothing to do but cry … and laugh.

[Author]

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