badger's hexastitch

harbinger

I had a long and complicated dream about Sue Vincent last night. I’m still trying to disentangle and figure it out. But the Oracle always knows what’s on my mind. After I visited Her, I looked for some art I had done for one of Sue’s prompts to accompany it. I knew immediately this was the one to use.

above
the rain do dreams
swim on light?  is that how
moon music recalls the language
of sea shadows
singing?

the blue of
darkness is
a blank canvas

from translucent music
comes
the shadow
of hope

moonbird rising
toward
the center of deep
light

embraced

I decided to do something a little different with Jane’s Random Word List this week–I cut out all the words and combined them with a few from my own collage box oracle on a painted postcard, as I like to do (but haven’t done often enough lately). The image was inspired by Colleen’s Tanka Tuesday prompt, the photo by her friend, Terri Webster Schrandt, below.

gentle
vagabond friend–
the countryside extends
great distances—opens
time to welcome
you home

all before us

The Oracle made me work a bit today. She did make me think of this little book I’ve been making from a catalog I received in the mail. You can make poetry from anything, even blurbs written to sell you things.

if we
listened as if
we could remember the
voices of angels in
side trees of stars–
what then?

would we
hear the heart of
the universe open
our breath, awakening
the foolchild to
being?

I’m going to be taking a bit of a break until the end of the year as I have piles of things I need to attend to. I’ll try to visit the Oracle as usual though.

flower of november

you fling
the blooms, graceful–
hands filled with abundance,
harvest untroubled by
time’s immanent
decay,

the cost
of seeds waxing–
each life encircled by
its opposite—how all
language breaks in
to tears—

but dance!–
the seasons are
not closed—the same sun that
sets early now will grow,
expand, greet sky
open

again,
in tangible
contrast to our useless
attempts to resist, turn
back clocks, challenge
the tides

My response to Merril’s autumn ekphrastic prompt at dVerse. I chose the above image, Child Dancing With Chrysanthemum Branch. Chrysanthemums are the birth flower of November, symbolizing both long life and mourning or grief. I’ve used Jane’s Oracle 2 words as inspiration.

I did not realize until after I wrote the poem and was searching for appropriate images how well it fit this response to Nick Cave’s soundsuits that I did for a recent Kick-About prompt.

The soundsuits created by Nick Cave, the artist, are totally different than the songs created by Nick Cave, the musician.

who walks this nightpath

My message from the Oracle this morning. The first word she gave me was “animal” but it seems she meant their presence to be inferred by the Badger form.

ask the
long always for
sanctuary—beneath
seasons of riversong
here follows deep
between

why and
how to listen
when moonspirit is about–
wandering ancient light
through forested
earthshine

The art is from the archives–one of many mandalas I did for Sue Vincent’s prompts.

Volcano 4

halfway
is never fixed–
merging not in a line,
but positioned between–
too brief to be
resolved

the madness of fate–
consummation and release,
sweeping life away

Another collage inspired by Elisa Ang’s painting, paired with the Badger and Kick-About poem, above, and my Pure Haiku Volcano contribution which you can read here.

Volcano 3

puzzling
destinations–
the details repeated,
magnified, untraveled–
living outside
a map

random lines break down–
the page explodes, caught trembling–
from nothing, vast light

The Kick-About poem and collage and Oracle 2 Badger above serve as a prelude to my third Volcano offering at Pure Haiku, which you can read here.

Volcano 1

what season is this?
dark, enigmatic, grown wild–
spilling from our eyes

don’t weep–
rings encircle
us inside life’s limits–
we must learn to accept
the turning of
the tides

Elisa Ang provided the artistic inspiration, above, for my series of volcano poems appearing this week at Pure Haiku. Serendipitously, the Kick-About recently hosted a prompt based on Turner’s painting of Mt. Vesuvius, for which I made a series of collages and wrote a cadralor of volcano-themed poems titled “In Search of Venus”. And Jane’s Oracle 2 words provided further inspiration for me to write five Badger poems to go with the volcano theme.

You can read my poem at Pure Haiku here. Thanks, as always, to Freya Pickard for her continued support of my work.

Portents

Colleen’s #TankaTuesday Ekphrastic prompt, a painting by John Waterhouse, reminded me very much of the paintings Jane Dougherty used to provide for her writing prompts. And so, as I did for those paintings, I created a collage response and consulted the Collage Box Oracle. A badger’s hexastitch was the result.

outside
the rules of time
matter gathers stories
of reimagined light
dreamed into the
beyond

Also linking to dVerse OLN.