Next Experiment with Animated/Video Poems

This week, I created another animated/videopoem. I wanted to be sure I returned to Movie Maker before I forgot how to use it. I still haven't experimented with sound. Perhaps I'll do that in the coming weeks.

Here's the stanza of the poem as it appears traditionally, on the page or on the screen (scroll down to see the whole poem):

If God is an old woman,
She saves all our old clothes. She alone
has a vision of a collage of cloth.
She cuts new shapes out of our discards
and pieces them into an intricate quilt,
even though she knows we will fail
to appreciate her demonstrated skill.

Here's my animated/video version:

This morning, I had a horrifying thought: without sound, am I just really making PowerPoint presentations? I haven't really done much with that program, because my early years of seeing other people's PowerPoint presentations left me with such a bad taste in my mouth. If no one ever reads a slide show to me ever again, it will be too soon.

So, I must continue to work to make sure I'm creating the best projects that I know how to do. But I think it's instructive to post these early efforts too.

Here's the poem in its entirety. It first appeared in Interdisciplinary Humanities.

The Precious Nature of Junk

If God is an old woman,
She uses no recipe.
Long ago she learned
what she needed to know:
how to make do with scarce
resources, how to create successful
substitutions, how to create
magic from simple kitchen chemistry.

If God is an old woman,
She saves all our old clothes. She alone
has a vision of a collage of cloth.
She cuts new shapes out of our discards
and pieces them into an intricate quilt,
even though she knows we will fail
to appreciate her demonstrated skill.

If God is an old woman,
She longs for closer connection.
She sends cards for every occasion
and fills the answering machine with cryptic
messages. She has such important
information to pass on and such little
time left. We listen
and wonder at her mental state.

If God is an old woman,
She knows that everything could have a larger
purpose. She hoards items we’d have discarded
long ago. She understands the precious
nature of junk.