poetry

Asylum

Look further on ahead, there between truth and falsehood, a little empty space.
–Amrita Pritam

This house has
no walls—it emits no
sound, gathers no surroundings from the
air.  It is this:  a place to hesitate before
beginning.  It constantly seeks out
less and less and still less,
a story

compressed in
side an ordering of
emptiness, a letting of going,
a happening of what and is not. Unfurnished,
it decorates its absence without
any punctuation.
Unsentenced.

Punam introduced us at dVerse to poet Amrita Pritam and gave us a selection of poetic lines to use as inspiration. I’ve written a triquain.

A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall

“Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?”
“To market, to market, to buy a big gun.”

we confuse
omniscience and
ignorance,
redundant
in our habitual
failure to protect

we collect
wealth, polluted with
jealousy,
smothered in
waste—we admire and support
incompetence, greed

we spend time
staring at our screens–
glowing with
apathy,
motionless, a shadow of
imminent demise

Jane Dougherty posted some randomly generated words this morning for us to use to make a poem. After seeing “blue-eyed” I could not get Dylan’s song out of my head, and the word “market” provided the reply, mirroring both the news and my continued distress about it.

I struggled to go somewhere else, but ended up with the above depressing and not-very-poetic shadorma chain.

Dylan (as always) says it much better than I.

I’ve stepped in the middle of seven sad forests
I’ve been out in front of a dozen dead oceans
I’ve been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard
And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, and it’s a hard
It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall

aftermath

My nights are troubled. What must it be like for the families in Uvalde? Although our politicians don’t seem to be losing any sleep.

rain shows up sad
like the ache beneath the shadow
of my black moon dreams

sleep runs away

who are you I ask
as tongues fiddle
in a language that worships death

the day begins
with bloodshot eyes

Mirage

I had just finished this monostich postcard when I saw Ingrid’s prompt at dVerse for a poem about a member of the Corvid family. I’ve written drawn painted and collaged many times about crow–not just here, but on memadtwo as well.

My word collage postcards are not always monostich, but many of them are.

That’s an old one, above, entitled, “Crow Says…”, inspired by Van Gogh.

And here’s a recent one done in Poetry Partnership with David, at The Skeptic’s Kaddish. This one is an American Sentence.

Without crow, the enchanted is always uncertain.

Agnes was here (before Hugo, Fran, Floyd…

…Isabel, Jeanne, Ivan, Charley, Katrina, Rita, Wilma, Ike, Irene, Sandy, Maria, Irma, Harvey, Michael, Laura, Ida…)

the glass falls shattered by the wind
the water rises to the trees
the heavens cry that we have sinned
approach the ending on your knees

the water rises to the trees
the air in spirals bends the sky
approach the ending on your knees
you’ve passed the time for asking why

the air in spirals bends the sky
a wild revolving cosmic hole
you’ve passed the time for asking why
you must surrender all control

A wild revolving cosmic hole
the heavens cry that we have sinned
you must surrender all control–
the glass falls shattered by the wind

In his discussion this week at earthweal of extremes, Brendan specifically mentions unrelenting storms and hurricanes as part of the new weather patterns brought on by climate change. When I looked up the damage and death from hurricanes in The United States and the Caribbean the last 50 years, since Agnes in 1972, it was hard not to be stunned by the continued lackadaisical response of our government to the obvious magnification of severe weather. Band-aids for situations that require surgery.

breathing

I woke up this morning thinking of Sue Vincent. The words the Oracle gave me reflect that. She must have been in my dream, although all I remember is the ending which had snow and bright yellow dogs.

The art I was drawn to when looking through the archives for something to illustrate the words was also done for Sue’s prompts.

almost like light
this dusky song
a gentle color

of secret sound
murmured by roots and rain

how to follow
through beneath beside

ask the ancient path
to walk with you

letting go

why wait for now to pass?
always living in to be—
tomorrow is not where we are, ever

each minute, hour, a chance
encounter we can’t foresee
full of spans impossible to measure

where am I?  here and now
and no place else—out or in,
over or under, it doesn’t matter

each fragment itself whole–
each moment contained within
the present completeness of forever

I haven’t written a kerf poem in awhile. The W3 prompt this week, a response to Burden of Time by A. J. Wilson, also has the restrictions of 12 lines or less, and the use of the word fragment. The kerf, a 12-line poem, was just right. You can read A. J. Wilson’s poem here.

Illustrations are two variations on the seed of life motif.

reticulation

spinning winding then weaving
spiraling into endless
connections which appear
to be hanging nowhere
suspended without edge
ending always at inception
never does the fiber fray
the beginning continues

follow where it leads
through the unknown
miles of endless webs
a glittering reflection
metamorphoses
illuminating the darkness
accumulations
of ancient intricacies

dispersed without direction
resonating chords
of the cosmos naked
glory of formless flow
undefined by outlines
unshadowed unbroken
blurring the boundaries
between us and we

For earthweal, where Sherry asks us to Contemplate the web of life and see where it takes you.

avigation, or: how else to touch the sky?

moon appears as reflection–
sun mirrored into night
but brighter, closer

and how far is far away?–
forever, sometimes, as if
never were always the answer
to the question of when

third eye digs deeper,
dreamclosing the distance, the interval
between asleep and wings

It was cloudy when the moon was eclipsing last night, but later on it cleared into mist, and woke me up, as it is wont to do–the top photo is how it looked through my bedroom window about 3am. And above is a close up. The mist allowed me to get some detail–when it’s very clear all that shows up in photos is an intense light.

A quadrille using the word sleep for Sarah at dVerse. I’ve borrowed the dual title idea from David at The Skeptic’s Kaddish–I ran across the word avigation (it means aerial navigation) recently, and I’ve been wanting to use it for something ever since.

The moon was misty last week too.

rising

My message from the Oracle. The almost-full moon woke me again last night. And at dawn–robin, blue jay, mockingbird, cardinal, mourning dove, crow–they are still here.

birds grow quiet
as
the spirit wanders
between why
and the ancient moon
that wakes me
shining through this season
of night

I ask dawn for song
listen
as dark becomes light

Another one of my Redon-inspired collages, and some birdlings from the archives.