she spins a new cocoon… wings folded, form fading, reflecting back as ghost shadows –enter– the dark circle of the forest moves ever closer as time compresses –itself– quiescent…what is done is done…what will emerge as the continuum –expands– unbounded, uncharted, starborne she waits…her elements recombined as essence
I used the (repeated) butterfly cinquain form because Diana Peach’s #photoprompt illustration, above, for Colleen’s #TankaTuesday, made me think immediately of a butterfly/cocoon.
For the artwork I did a painting inspired by the illustration and then fooled around with it in Photoshop to try to convey a feeling of metamorphosis.
The Kick-About #15 features lithography illustrations by Eric Ravilious from the book High Street. I was immediately drawn to the shop full of masks, above. I’ve drawn, painted, stitched and collaged many masks over the years, and I also have quite a few that I’ve collected, stored and waiting for a place to be displayed.
horse
For the prompt, I decided to focus on Mexican animal masks, since the animal masks in the shop illustration seemed to be the most prominent element.
dog
Masking has a long history in the indigenous culture of the Americas, and animals are commonly used in dances, ritual, and ceremonies, often combined with Christian stories and characters.
fox
Masks are vessels in which a powerful energy is stored, an energy than can help cross the boundaries between human and animal, creating a co-existence of spirits in the same body.
bull/lizard
I confess that once I got started with these it was hard to stop.
hummingbird
The technique I used was the Rorschach monoprint–I painted one side and folded the paper in the center and pressed down to create a mirror image.
jaguar
owl
and if they take me to heart, if they pull me through their own openings
will I flow, float dreaming in side their abiding presence–
no, not dead, but yet not of the living—unbound by movement or time,
reconnected, emerged as an ancestor to myself
pig
horned creature
what came out was not the same as what went in
eagle
goat
I liked the bat so much I did it twice, once on red paper and once on white.
Lost among the layers of words, my needs slip through the cracks that keep opening into assaults on the ways that have always belonged to me. I don’t want to be reoriented towards a future I can’t imagine, or pushed through a portal into a world I don’t understand. A world that does not recognize me and has no relationship to the one that has always sheltered me from unwelcome change.
All those strident sentences you spit out—they mock my choices, erasing any value in what I call a good life. The scale on which you judge me makes my wishes weigh nothing. You discard everything that makes me happy.
The tasks of survival are not so easily sorted into black and white, good and evil. What seems to work for the time being is all we can attain sometimes, worth more than the promises of a future that we can’t see.
It’s impossible to know God’s plans or to understand them—despite your fancy degrees and charts, there are realms beyond the facts, beyond what you call science, that we can’t anticipate or control.
Instead you put yourself above me. But you appear in my mirror as one-dimensional, rejecting me and the grieving that belongs to me, the losses I have experienced and feel. You insist they are worthless, I am worthless. But what do you offer to me that will replace them?
You list all my beliefs and shame them, shame me, shame my culture, my family, my friends. And you call it compassion.
I am not asking for your false understanding. I do not want what you want, what you think I need.
I want to be worth something. I want to matter to someone, something. I want a world that holds out a hand and tells me I belong. Where has it gone?
look at me listen to my life make me real
Jim Feeney at Earthweal gave us quite a challenge this week: to write a poem from the point of view of someone who is a climate change denier or a climate solution denier or someone who just doesn’t care because they won’t be around when it happens. It’s not easy to put yourself sympathetically in someone else’s shoes. I chose to repeat some of the words and ideas I heard in interviews with Trump supporters, figuring no environmentalist would ever vote for Trump. I have to admit I resent the fact that the media always tells us we need to try to “understand” people who support Trump, and yet Trump supporters never have to return the favor and try to understand those of us who don’t. We are not all wealthy Ivy League educated “elites”.
And the thing is…in the end our desires are not so different. I don’t reject science and I would not talk of God, but I have spiritual beliefs too that involve feelings and ideas that can’t really be quantified. I also often feel unacknowledged, dismissed, invisible. I have lost parts of my life that will never return and cannot be replaced. We all want to matter, to belong somewhere.
Why can’t we make that somewhere a place of mutual respect that honors our interdependence with the natural world? So we have a world where everyone’s children and grandchildren have a fighting chance at survival?
Zero nests in between darkness and light– the black snake of the enso– ouroboros consuming itself, surrounded by circles of white waves that are all colors condensed into the vision of none.
The emptiness of white is contained in the deep vast eternity of black– an uneasy balance of possibility ready to step into the abyss like the fool.
Zero is the harlequin of innocence wearing the mask of either/or– comedy and tragedy opposing but always joined–
a placeholder, not grey, not veiled, but reflecting an infinity that can be seen only in relationship, that when multiplied becomes both more of what it is and more of what it is not.
Dusklight and dawnlight hover on the border of uncertainty– the hidden rainbow and the vast uncolorable center of waiting that is the cosmic mind.
For the dVerse prompt of synesthesia, provided by Grace.
in the deep darkness I follow and am pushed through sequences that turn me inside out
hours pass as they bypass me– we seem to be in different stories
the pages open to places I have seen before while the landscape becomes a backdrop to somewhere else
crow flies over the fields between worlds carrying the ears of wheat to be planted in both places at once
tolling in concert with the continuous chaos I wonder at the expanse of tangled entrances and exits in the mouth of the threshold
which side am I on? my voice carries nowhere as I reach out to catch the wings of the wind
This was done for a dVerse prompt from August, where Rosemarie Gonzales offered wheat as a poetic inspiration. I took 2 lines from one of the Neruda poems she provided, Ah Vastness of Pines, and incorporated it in pieces to make my own verse: Thus in the deep hours I have seen, over the fields, the ears of wheat tolling in the mouth of the wind.
The voice of the wind is harsh, unending, bringing news of winter. Under dusky grey I watch the heavens close in as tree bones rattle with last leaves. Night is everywhere, penetrating with howling visions the sanctity of sleep.
Solitude is impossible. Chanting surrounds me, invisible hands, the edge of a nightmare hovering on the threshold. Ghostlike it travels through the streets, knocking on each door, finding the cracks in each soul, rearranging the molecules of each defense. No prayer or good luck charm repels the chosen path of this bleak pilgrim. Its faceless form looms like a black hole.
A cacophony of silence tunnels into the center of my mind. It asks me no questions, desires no answers–an insatiable voice in a vortex ancient, eternal, lost.
forsaken, stars hide– sky fallen into stillness swallowing the moon
For the Earthweal Weekly Challenge, A Hallowed Moondance.
all most dreamed synthesized otherworldly this hour this hidden light found by shifting seasons like a song already known a secret spellbound heartsown with haunted melodies resonating as echoes returned from a lost refrain
For Colleen’s Tanka Tuesday where the prompts this week were a photo provided by Trent McDonald (above) and/or synonyms for the words “MOVE & MAKE” provided by David Ellis.
