mandala

Trees Ring You With Watchful Silence

Hands pause—you whistle between.  White bridge slips through your fingers.
Who can number the space of days?  To cross them, you must open.
The gate shapes all beginnings, all answers, to equal zero.

This is a black & white image of an ornate pond & garden from the Felt Estate in western Michigan
© Lisa Fox, Felt Mansion

Lisa, at Tao Talk, supplied Colleen’s #TankaTuesday image, above. I wanted to try a sijo, which is the Wombwell Rainbow’s form this week. I think I’ve done one before, but it was a long time ago. I like the way it encourages the writer to think about different aspects of the same thought.

I’ve used some embroidered circles I did for a Kick-About prompt as illustration–the Eames Powers of Ten film, a barrage of images, made me think of zero, Lisa’s photo reminded me also of crossing the circles of space and time.

This week’s Oracle 2 words from Jane gave me a starting point–whistle. Which made me think of whistling in the wind. The human condition. Nevertheless, we continue.

You can read the story of the photo at Tao Talk here.

because

The Oracle insisted I use the Mustache kit this morning, and this is what she gave me there. When I was looking in the archives for art, besides the above image, I came across another one I’ve used before. That one, below, was used for one of Jane’s Yeats challenges, which she and I had just been talking about,

“Do you not hear me calling, white deer with no horns?”
–Yeats

Crown falls with
angels and stars, laughs,
becomes seeds–
now singing,
calling to earth’s children—Come!
Touch the sacred skies!

if you believe in the mystery
life is poetry–
growing roots–calling
with the power of a stillness
beyond space or time

damaged

impossibly strewn,
all authority breaks down–
the fierce mother speaks

impossibly strewn,
feral rain roars, abstracted–
wind swims through the streets

authority breaks down,
chokes on forgotten questions–
threads turn into knots

the fierce mother speaks–
wild voices rise, converging–
elemental fire

The phrase that jumped out at me when I looked at Jane’s Oracle 2 words this week was “the fierce mother speaks”. I’ve been ruminating on it all week and finally came up with a poem yesterday. I spent a long time fooling around on the computer with the above image, which took a scan of an asemic drawing I made and added some Photoshopped images. The collage is from the archives.

Also linking to Sherry’s earthweal challenge, wild souls. Whose soul is wilder than that of Mother Nature?

incorporeal

to be an observer
is more than a mere o
pening of the eyes–
you must vanish from the sight
of what you see, become
an immersion, a current
consumed by the between,
inside its invisible
core of light

Brendan at earthweal gave us some photos to work with for our poems this week. I chose the photo above, although the other ones are still on my mind.

Night Journey/passages

I submit most months to Visual Verse, and have had many poems published (thank you!). But some I like better than others. This month’s poem, “Night Journey”, is one of them. You can read it here.

My poem “passages”, written to Jo Zider’s artwork, is also up at The Ekphrastic Review. My thanks to guest editor Sandi Stromberg, and to Lorette C. Luzajic for her continued support. You can read it here.

I think the poems complement each other. Which only highlights how I return to the same themes again and again…

The Melting of Time

Snowfall.  Night.
The shore is distant.
I dream of
flying—but
I remain enclosed within
ice blue, glittering.

North seems far–
where I am has no
direction.
The landscape
retreats until almost all
is trapped within dreams.

Barren seas
echo with silence.
The world cracks.
Wind weeps in
side chasms of solitude–
the melting of time.

Sherry’s heartbreaking photo, above, that accompanied her prompt at earthweal to talk about the connections between life and the melting ice of the arctic, inspired the dreamscape of my shadorma chain, written also for Colleen’s #TankaTuesday, where Jules selected shadorma as this month’s form.

be the asking

My message this morning from the Oracle. My dream last night included lots of children–laughing, singing, and telling each other stories.

when the universe was young
born from color
and rhythm-kissed voices
singing open with ferocious joy

sacred fools danced into always
flying like cloud ghosts
dazzled with star magic

who lost the way to eternity
the secrets of sailing ocean skies
the heartbreath of how we are?

River Man

She did not remember the way, but she remembered the times, the place.  She wanted to connect present to past.  She did not know how or where to begin, and yet she needed to try to construct that bridge.  Words were all she had now.

Two ways, really, even though she always pretended they were the same.  Or maybe it was only her longing that failed to understand that they were two, not one.

She had been dreaming of a river.  A man, a boat.  Trees, weeping, or was that her own voice, crying on the wind?  It had been summer once.  Flowered.  Sweet.

But here was the river again, littered with fallen leaves.  What magic word would turn back the seasons, dispel the haze, repair a lifetime that had already disintegrated into dust?

Was she coming or going?  In her dreams a voice kept repeating you have to choose.  But between what?  Who?  Did she get to choose who would be waiting on the other side of the river?  Or was she to be the one left waiting?

to begin,
become the current–
sing its song

Brendan at earthweal has more to say about rivers this week and poses the question: What voyages are found there, which deities are vast in its depths? It made me think of my response to the Kick-About #61 prompt, which was Molly Drake’s haunting song, “I Remember”.

I wasn’t aware of Molly’s connection to Nick Drake, but when I learned that she was his mother, Molly’s song immediately made me think of Nick’s song “River Man”. I took the feeling I got from both songs–a kind of remembering intertwined with uncertainty, loss, and the passing of time–and wrote the above prose poem, adding a haiku coda for earthweal, and some water art from my archives.

Jupiter Dreams

I visited the Oracle as usual early this morning, and her words so much reminded me of the NASA photos of Jupiter I saw recently that I did something I haven’t done in a very long time–I painted a piece of art especially for her words, rather than searching through my archives. It’s still wet, so the colors may change when it dries, and it doesn’t exactly resemble Jupiter, but it’s the spirit more than the exact image that I wanted to capture.

The cosmos is endlessly and unbelievably beautiful, despite the havoc humans may be imposing on our tiny and insignificant blue planet. A little perspective does the psyche good.

born in the blush
between air and breath

like laughter dancing naked
over oceans of ferocious life

the voice of the universe
embraces the holes
in our foolish desires

sailing them open
into a vast sky of magic nights
surrounded by dazzling stars