Once rampant with color, its fragrance long gone, the paint has dried into textured lines– afternoons of melodic stillness now mourned– decorative traces lost inside frozen time.
The paint has dried into textured lines, ringed by the noise of questions unasked– decorative traces lost inside frozen time bleeding destruction we haven’t yet grasped,
Ringed by the noise of questions unasked life is tenuous, scattered, emotions removed– bleeding destruction we haven’t yet grasped, as over and over we bandage the wounds.
Life is tenuous, scattered, emotions removed, following roads that only disappear– over and over we bandage the wounds– the darkness rises, overwhelming with fear.
Following roads that only disappear, like the garden once bursting with growth— the darkness rises, overwhelming with fear– sky is silent, empty, brittle as bones
We lived in a garden bursting with growth, afternoons of melodic stillness, now mourned– sky is silent now, empty, brittle as bones– once rampant with color, its fragrance long gone.
I love pantoums, but I usually don’t rhyme them, so this proved challenging to me. It still could use some revision, but I need to let it sit for awhile. Punam asked for a pantoum on the theme of abandonment for her W3 prompt this week. I had also been thinking about Sherry’s prompt at earthweal, asking us to write about all the species vanishing around us. And Colleen’s prompt for Tanka Tuesday, a painting by Monet (below), had me thinking about what we’ve lost since Monet painted all his overflowing gardens at Giverny. Will we one day only know such beauty as a digital image?
I also started out with a lot of words from this week’s Random Word Generator, but some of them dropped out during revisions.
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.
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
a misted bridge forms across the water– our voices dance as if they were winged
across the water we float airborne touching the sky
our voices dance uncontained scattering the light
as if we were winged needing no reason playing with life itself
For dVerse, where Lisa asks us to play. Also inspired by the photo, above, by Terri Webster Schrandt, provided by Colleen for this week’s Tanka Tuesday. I’ve written another trimeric poem.
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
I pause on the edge of dark, on the edge of light, my direction halted by uncertainty. Between is a narrow ledge, a threshold balanced on an abyss. Am I coming or going? The end is also the beginning and all my questions are merely maps without roads.
I have become abstracted by an imagined journey in which seeking transforms into finding. In which the visions that ripple my consciousness turn out to be real. But what if matter is as transient as thought?
half-awake, spirit splits, expands—crescent-mirrored into cosmic tides
Frank at dVerse asks us to write a haibun referring to the Mezza Luna, the half or crescent moon. When I was looking for art for the post, I came across the collage at the top, which I used for another of Frank’s moon prompts a year ago.
I am always photographing the moon, so I had plenty of photos to choose from as well. The mirror effect in the first photo is caused by the window through which I shot the photo.
It was almost black, the river serpentine— everything looked like it was coated in silver, much bigger than he imagined, as if the surface was somehow a river of birds. The moon was right there, and every part of it, calling.
It’s an ancestral memory, a sound he remembers from before he hears it.
How dark the water was, prehistoric, too loud, flung forward as the wave broke. The sky slips from peach to garnet to blood.
Who can say? Life is long out here.
Laura at dVerse asked us to alternate lines from one page in each of two books and construct a patchwork poem. My sources were: