Wheels

The color wheel turns,
spilling yellow into blue–
and suddenly the world is
green, seeded, growing

The wheel of the seasons turns,
the green fades–
but the sun’s intensity lingers,
harvested into gold

The ferris wheel turns,
launching dreams
toward the indigo sky
before falling back to earth

The wheel of fortune turns
on the midway,
illuminating the night–
casting its hues into shadow

For the W3 prompt this week, Melissa gave us a choice of two Marc Chagall paintings, and asked us to respond to one of them and incorporate the colors in our poem. I chose “The Big Wheel”, above.

I did two paintings and cut one up to make a grid.

Also linking to dVerse, where OLN is hosted by Mish.

enmeshed

blues transpose
against each other,
broken into
patterns, as
threads barely stitched into air
become one with sky—

a shadow
rests lightly, almost
unnoticed–
awaiting
disturbances in the web–
summoning futures,

the castings
of circumstances–
eyes glinting
like mirrored
kismetic intersections
of orbiting moons

A shadroma quadrille for dVerse, where Merril has given us the word mirror.

sun moon hand eye circle snake

we grow wings, awaiting the return of the sun
as branches and leaves dance patterns over the moon–
invisible roots weave themselves through our hands
and become imprinted inside our eyes–
alert to the gaps in the circle,
we lie still, glittering like coiled snakes

We shed our skins, discarding them like snakes
and bask in glittered nakedness beneath the sun.
We turn our insides out, become the circle–
shapeshifting, orbed, a secret following the moon
through the thousand doors of the cosmic eye,
the lines on the palm of the soothsayer’s hand.

We stand just out of reach, beyond time’s hand
among the whispers in the wake of the snake.
The sky trembles as we gather into the Devil’s Eye
and rearrange the seasons by summoning the sun,
dropping it into darkness.  Who can contain the moon?
The hares alone see everything, like the circle.

Exposed and whirling us in surprise, the circle
weaves a web of lines into every hand,
a talisman of light reflecting the moon.
It collects our beginnings and endings.  The snake
trades paths with the absent elsewhere of the sun,
a geography that exists beyond the all-seeing eye.

Our spirits walk on the edge of the hare’s eye
as hidden crows echo across the circle
trying to catch the light, steal the fire from the sun.
The landscape breaks apart, a wheel without a hand,
consumed by the changing riddles of the snake,
retrieving its magic by chanting the songs of the moon.

Our hares are like ships that sail the moon,
shining in the mirror of the third eye.
We feast on desire like the dreamsnake,
bending layers of souls into a spiraled circle.
Crow approaches and takes each open hand,
extending its wings to carry us far away from the sun.

Reawakening the moon, we reverse the circle,
crossing the hare’s eye with the left hand.
The snake casts its ancient shadow through the sun.

Lisa and David both posted sestinas yesterday, which reminded me I had never posted this one, which I began with one stanza for the Kick About prompt that highlighted the quilts of Harriet Powers. I later revised and completed it to submit to The Ekphrastic Review as a response to the wonderful print by Jane Burn, above.

For the Kick About, I made felt appliqued circles, similar to those found in penny rugs, taking the motifs from the quilts. I didn’t have a large enough piece of fabric to sew them on, so I photographed them on black paper, white paper, and the wood floor. I’m still undecided as to which background would be best, so the circles are still in a bin waiting to be put together.

There were birds in Powers’ quilts too. I didn’t put them in my felt circles, but I didn’t forget them either.

Ossified

fold/transform/mold–
sunny April
afternoon, now
cold, shivered, closed

part of the heart
on the edge of
your atmosphere
not weeping but

paused in because
disillusioned–
tiny box of
lies and last straws—

hard tuneless chord–
this life in a
bottle—unsung,
wordless, cleft, scarred

I wanted to do Punam’s music prompt earlier this week, but I always have trouble making random song titles sound natural in a poem. I was also intrigued by Sangeetha’s DoReMiDo nonce form on Muri’s April Scavenger Hunt list, but uncertain how to make it work. My solution was to attempt to combine the two.

I did slant the rhymes, but managed to merge both into a somewhat coherent form, incorporating one song title into the middle of each stanza of the poem. This week’s Random Word List also helped out.

For dVerse OLN, hosted by Grace, and NaPoWriMo–two days to go!

This is the music under my embroidery, above.

Abstracted and Possessed

Abaft of my vision,
blurred yet somehow still, I feel the presence of
cats, tense with
delight as they
edge along the shadow and
furtively slither through the hallway,
gracefully falling into a nonchalant
humdrum sprawl in a patch of sun.
Indulge us, they seem to say–
Join us
K.  Leave your word
lines behind and
migrate into this lazy light.

No calamities will
occur if you
pet us, pay attention to our
quiet majesty.
Really.  If we make you
sneeze, you can brew
tea, and you will be fine.  Our fur will not
upset your respiratory tract
.  Though usually
vigorous in my avoidance, I
walk right into their trap,
xactly as they knew, in their
youthful, smirking,
zen superiority, that I would.

The NaPoWriMo prompt today was to write to write an abecedarian poem–not something I would normally do, since it feels like you are forcing some of the letters (like x) to work somehow. But when I looked at the Random Word List from Sunday, the word cats jumped out at me, and also the fact that most of the letters of the alphabet were represented among the words. Almost all the beginning line words in my poem are from the list, and I just fudged the x word.

I really am allergic to cats, which I discovered when my roommate moved to Pittsburg with her boyfriend and his dog and left her kitten behind. We had never given him a name, calling him Mr. Kitten, which became, appropriately, Mr. K. I had to give him away when my asthma got too bad and I ended up in the hospital, something that still fills me with sadness.

But I’m still an easy mark for a cat.

Bewilderment

I am floating face down in a horizonless body of water.  My eyes are open; I seem to be balanced in the center of a giant labyrinthine sphere.  Like an octopus, or a circular net with ends stretching down, down, beyond all comprehension.  Somehow I can breathe.

All the rootpaths below me are in constant motion.  I dive between, in the unfixed spaces that surround them.  I sense that they are hollow, that they lead somewhere, but I can’t locate the wormhole.  The orb turns, whorling, gathering me into its patterned dance.

I am nowhere in space in time.  I sit thousands of feet above the sea, star-covered, as I swim inside the ocean’s womb.  I don’t understand how to locate myself, how to divide the illusions until they reach zero.  The still point of what is and is not.  There.  Here?  Both.  And…

Merril provided this quote from May Sarton this week for dVerse prosery: “In space in time I sit thousands of feet above the sea” But as she pointed out, my prose is too much like poetry to really be prosery. I had a couple requests to leave the post up anyway, so I decided to put it back up.

sun moon earth

Laura at dVerse provided lists of word-threesomes to choose from to write a sequence of three poems. Sun, moon, earth jumped out at me and the Oracle seemed the right place to go to construct verse using those three words.

1
ask the sun
if dusk feels as full
as the dawn

2
ask the moon
if dark is as deep
as always

3
ask the earth
if between grows roots
with seedsong

Soundscape

Of course I always notice the birds.

I’m waiting for the robins to begin my morning–the cardinal, the flicker, the mockingbird.  Then I will be certain spring has arrived.  But the crows are back, as opinionated as always, and the crowds of blue jays and sparrows never left.  A mourning dove croons from a nearby roof outside my kitchen window as the sun rises.

I habitually tune out the sirens, garbage trucks, helicopters, low-flying planes, motorcycles, cars and buses, construction—all the normal background noise of city living.

But the air itself has gotten louder lately.  Sometimes when I wake up in the middle of the night I can barely hear myself think over its whisper-hum.  My head is completely emptied of dreams; I am conscious only of my body in bed, surrounded by a constant movement murmuring in my ears.

Daylight does not mute the stormy sounds that show up suddenly and randomly, demanding attention, interrupting thought.  The nonstop intersection of voices, layered in a language I don’t understand, drowns out all other discourse.

It reminds me of the ocean–unbroken, all-encompassing, alive.  A presence much larger than my own.  To be inside of it is perhaps all the translation, the guidance, that is necessary.

on the street dogs bark–
the sky darkens—lights turn on–
I breathe in, then out

I’m a little late with Sherry’s prompt from last week at earthweal of Soundscapes–I’m squeezing it in at the last minute for the weekend open link. I’ve also used some of this week’s random word generator oracle words, which you can find here.

All art is from the archives.

WORLD LEADERS DECLARE AN END TO WAR

Armies To Be Disbanded, All Weapons Destroyed

Yesterday the earth’s nations signed an agreement to end armed conflict between any and all of its peoples.  There was dancing in the streets as all over the world people joined hands in unity and sang about love trains and peace trains and harmony echoing through the land and into every human heart.

Handmade signs spoke in multiple languages waving above the crowds:  “People Have The Power!”, “I Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore”, “War Is Not The Answer”, “We Are All Human”, “Nothing Funny Bout Peace!”, “Study War No More”, “Get Together”, “We CAN Change the World!”, and the simple and ubiquitous “Imagine”.

The assembly spoke in a single voice as the papers were signed:  Amen.

Selma’s W3 Prompt this week was to “Write a ‘prose poem’ in the form of a news article you wish would come out tomorrow”. Yoko Ono took out ads in the NY Times on John’s birthday for a number of years promoting an end to war, and a few years ago when I was doing my “headline haiku” series on altered pages from the newspaper I used some of them for my art. So it seemed a natural subject to choose for my news story.

…with thanks for words of inspiration to Martha and the Vandellas, The O’Jays, Cat Stevens, Nanci Griffith, Patti Smith, Phil Ochs, Marvin Gaye, Anti-Flag, Nick Lowe, Pete Seeger, The Youngbloods, Crosby Stills and Nash, and John Lennon

Seventeen

Nothing
remains, except
this quickened memory–
how brief and wondrous it was, that
first love

A cinquain for Colleen’s Tanka Tuesday, with the photo prompt above by Terri Webster Schrandt.

Frank @ Beach Walk Reflections posted this week about love. His meditations always make me think of music and I considered all the love songs I knew, and how difficult it was to capture the essence of love in words. This morning I put on Donovan’s Fairy Tale album and the first song, “Colours”, struck all the right chords, as it had when I first heard it 50 years ago, conjuring that time and space in my life when the complexities of the future did not yet exist. Ephemeral, but nonetheless still very real, even now, from this far away country where I presently reside.