The dance

I wake up to dancing dappled sunlight.

The sky has forgotten
last night's thunderstorm.
But not the mother bird
whose nest has fallen.

Yet seeds will sprout at that spot
among the knitted twigs
and broken egg shells.

Life moves from form to form.

I only need to sit back and
watch the play of illusions.

Like the playful sunbeams
dancing gaily on my face.

~~~ ~~~

NaPoWriMo 24 - Caves

For NaPoWriMo day 24, a confession -

CAVES  - haiku

I found there are caves
in my heart I didn't know about.
There be demons.

~~~

NaPoWriMo 9 - A fragment of a dream

For day 9, a sweet, sad poem on a dream I saw the other day -


A terse dream this was,
broken, anguished, blurred,
of which a fragment remains
in my memory, embedded.

A wayward bullet strikes
at lightning speed your chest,
passing through it spears,
calmly, through my breast.

Locked in a gaze we stand,
as love flows out the wounds.
Caught tight in death’s hand
as the dream softly fades.

On waking, for long I ponder;
did our souls our bodies flee
at the same moment, together?
Did they merge to become free?

Did pain set our insides afire?
Is sorrow the bullet that incinerates,
torching our ignorance, our desire,
and into freedom thus liberates?

~~~

NaPoWriMo 6 - Number games

For day 6, a pensive poem.

A NUMBER GAME - haiku

age, birthdays, death days
number games the world plays, ending
in nothingness

~~~

Nothing like one's birthday to ponder over the ephemeral nature of life.

Clearing

CLEARING

by Martha Postlewaite

Do not try to save
the whole world
or do anything grandiose.
Instead, create
a clearing
in the dense forest
of your life
and wait there
patiently,
until the song
that is your life
falls into your own cupped hands
and you recognize and greet it.
Only then will you know
how to give yourself
to this world
so worth of rescue.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Just what I needed to hear .....

~~~

Educating the heart and mind - Peace Summit 2009

Some of my favourite people in a panel discussion.
The 3 new Rs of education - reflection, relationships, and resilience.

(I hope I have put up the right video this time)

The link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suojNzKZ8ew

The Patience of Ordinary Things

by Pat Schneider

It is a kind of love, is it not?
How the cup holds the tea,
How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,
How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes
Or toes. How soles of feet know
Where they’re supposed to be.
I’ve been thinking about the patience
Of ordinary things, how clothes
Wait respectfully in closets
And soap dries quietly in the dish,
And towels drink the wet
From the skin of the back.
And the lovely repetition of stairs.
And what is more generous than a window?

~ Pat Schneider

"Another River: New and Selected Poems"

Death poems

On dVerse Poets Pub Gayle sets the challenge :  To write in haiku or tanka style to the theme of Jisei (Japanese death poems).

Gayle also says, "In ancient Japanese, Chinese and Korean cultures, a practice was used at the time of death to capture the last words spoken. This practice was called jisei (in Japan) or death poem and is the “farewell poem to life.” Jisei was written by monks, samurai, the literate and poets of these cultures. One of the earliest recorded jisei dates to 686 C.E. (Common Era) or in Christian terms, B.C. (before Christ) with the death of Prince Otsu who was the son of Emperor Temmu of Japan."

Japanese death poems - tanka

~~~

I hear the sea sing

in my veins, of homecoming.

Save your salty tears

for life and its sorry tales,

not me. I am going home.

~~~

This vain, heavy shell

I no longer need, fading

softly like daylight

surrenders to night, sighing

soft promises of return.

~~~

This shell will return

to its womb. My sinews will

turn into roots, limbs

into tree-trunks. And my song

will trill out from the tree tops.

~~~

Soon, I will be rain,

falling on seeds, springing them

into life. Lusty,

fecund, virile, alive. Death

is a mere wisp of a veil.

~~~

Sunbeam

(100 word flash fiction)

Family gone, career over, there was nothing to live for.

And so, she stood at the bridge, the portal between this life and the next. Above her, dark clouds rolled. The sky was already in mourning.

The office farewell gift, a brooch the colour of sunrise, felt heavy in her hand. As though pinning her down, inexorably, to the fabric of life.

She felt a tug on her sleeve. A teenage girl in tatters. A baby on her hip. Begging.

Inside her heart, gears shifted and moved. A sunbeam shot through the clouds.

“Would you like a meal? A home?”

~~~

Friday Fictioneers flash fiction for the photo prompt below -

PHOTO PROMPT © The Reclining Gentleman

The thief

(100 word flash fiction)

He pushed open the rusty gate and walked calmly to the crumbling house.

He planned to overpower her when she opened the door, force her to open the safe and decamp with the loot.

But, the door was open. She was lying on the floor. Her breaths long and laboured. Each one like it was the last.

Should he run, or call for help?

‘Who are you?” asked the emergency call operator.

The woman in an old photo on the wall looked just like the one in a photo he had carried in his wallet for 20 years.

“Her son.”

~~~

For Friday Fictioneers photo prompt below -

photo prompt © David Stewart

In continuum

(100 word flash fiction)

She ran her finger down the book’s spine.  It was coarse and unyielding like bark.

‘This was once a tree.’ She thought, bemused. ‘Its cells then rearranged into a different form to serve a different purpose.’

She looked around the room lined with books in shelves. She was in a jungle here. Except, it was not sap that was flowing but rivers of stories.

‘A house it could have been, sheltering people. Or a boat, gliding over the endless rivers. Living, serving, even after death.’

She pulled the form towards her and signed it, donating all her organs after death.

~~~

It’s that day of the week again when I check out the Friday Fictioneers page hosted by the lovely Rochelle and get a high by writing a short story based on the photo prompt which this week is –

PHOTO PROMPT – © Jennifer Pendergast

Canvas of failure - haiku

Over at the Imaginary Garden with Real Toads the challenge is to do ekphrastic poetry. Ekphrasis comes from Greek and means to use a description of art (the poem) as a rhetorical or imaginative description. With just a single piece of art, the challenge is to find a poem that does notjust describe the painting, but how it speaks to me, what stories I find in it.

Artist in his Studio by Rembrandt

Tongue-in-cheek haiku

Ugh! Did I paint that?

What was I thinking? Oh hell!

There goes my contract.

~~~

Plain old haiku

Decay seeped from walls

deep into his heart spaces

A desert canvas

~~~

All night rain falls

in the hills

an owl calls out for a mate

 all night rain falls

~~~

sleep sprites unreel

dream movies on closed eyelids

 all night rain falls

~~~

I wake from this dream

into a dream more real

 all night rain falls

the moon is an orange

the sound of rain a warning

~~~

This being a woman

This being a woman
is a holding back

words caught in the throat
pebbles, rocks, boulders,
but isn't it the stones
that make the river sing?


This being a woman
is a flowing around

a liquid grace,
a sinuous tenacity,
what obstacle has ever
stopped a river in flow?


This being a woman
is a relearning

no matter how much
the world breaks you,
were you not always
unbreakable and whole?


This being a woman
is a discovering

amidst a world that
denies you your dignity,
finding a world inner,
pure, precious, powerful.


This being a woman
is always about love

you may love one
or may love many,
but above all
you must love your self

~~~

The Heart of a Woman

by Georgia Douglas Johnson

 

The heart of a woman goes forth with the dawn,

As a lone bird, soft winging, so restlessly on,

Afar o'er life's turrets and vales does it roam

In the wake of those echoes the heart calls home.

The heart of a woman falls back with the night,

And enters some alien cage in its plight,

And tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars

While it breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars.

 

 

~~~

 

Awesome!

 

 

Befriending silence - tanka

your endless talk

on festers of loneliness

are but band-aids

come, let us befriend silence

the fullness of nothingness

~~~

The wounded heart - tanka

I do not know when

you impaled yourself in me

daring, unflinching

the wound has been bleeding 

nothing but exquisite joy

~~~

Just silence

a silence

sits on the moving river

call it a poem

or the spirit

from which all things rise

I just gaze until

it erases me

and then there is just silence

looking at itself

~~~

Forget-me-nots - haiku

forget-me-not, please

said Day to Night, in passing

the moon rose, rotund

solitary owl

calls out to a day unseen

forget-me-not, light

between the pages

turning into days and nights

pressed forget-me-nots

waves write parting notes
on the gently yielding sand
forget-me-not, shore
~~~

Centrifugal

CENTRIFUGAL

by Douglas S. Jones 

The spider living in the bike seat has finally spun

its own spokes through the wheels.

I have seen it crawl upside down, armored

black and jigging back to the hollow frame,

have felt the stickiness break

as the tire pulls free the stitches of last night's sewing.

We've ridden this bike together for a week now,

two legs in gyre by daylight, and at night,

the eight converting gears into looms, handle bars

into sails. This is how it is to be part of a cycle—

to be always in motion, and to be always

woven to something else.

~~~