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Welcome!

Thanks for visiting my new blog! I'm hopeful that this will be a little easier and more versatile. I'm planning to use this blog (as I used the old one) to post brand-new poems as I'm working on them. I've found that posting regularly can keep me going when I'm struggling to write, which is kind of happening lately.

I'm working on poems about two things just now: the weather and home (my home and other people's homes). If you've been reading my work for a while, you're probably saying, "This is nothing new." If there is anything "new" in my current work, it's that I'm writing a little bit about the flooding and awful weather that hit Washington state in early December; it wasn't too bad where I live, but there's been all sorts of trouble not too far south of here.

OK, to get the blog started, here's a new poem I worked on yesterday:

Not Ours

The privacy hedge half-hides
our backyard, not much

of our neighbors’, not the stoop
where their little terrier

barks at cats on our lawn
who come from who-knows-where.
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Comments

Jesse said…
Hi Amanda, happy new year,

I love your poems.

cheers,
Jess
December 31, 2007 at 8:31 PM
X. P. Callahan said…
If you think about it (but you don't really have to, since there are others among us who will), this little poem has universal appeal, in the best sense of that phrase
December 31, 2007 at 8:31 PM
Amanda Laughtland said…
Thanks, Jesse and XP!

Happy New Year to both of you. :)
January 1, 2008 at 9:54 PM
from Barbara A. Thomas said…
Greetings blogger! I always dig reading your impressively creative work on teeny tiny sites.

Barb
January 1, 2008 at 11:40 PM
martin marriott said…
I like the particular-preciseness of the things in it, it means that by the end i want 'who knows where' to be a definite too, although it can't ever be. Makes me kinda sea-sick. Like raking the leaves on a windy day. So the moment you've established order, it's a chaotic mess again. So much for the english-garden prissiness.

The poem is a dry joke?

The dog, the cats... i think somewhere in all this sits, like buddha, illicit sex.
January 2, 2008 at 6:56 PM
Amanda Laughtland said…
Thanks, Barb!

Martin, Well, I was literally describing some of what I see from the back window, except that I lied in calling the neighbor's dog a terrier because really I don't know what kind of dog it is. I hope there is no illicit sex occurring in the backyard, but I'm glad if Buddha's there.
January 3, 2008 at 10:18 AM
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