Tethered

Image is my own

https://sammiscribbles.wordpress.com/2021/07/03/weekend-writing-prompt-216-tether/

Lightning cracked the sky today

Very nearly tethering Desire and Want,

Who entwined, rolling from edge

To edge of the horizon—

 

And I walked,

Thinking I’d make it home

Before pelting rain could chill

My heated sweating skin.

 

But I did not.

Clothes soaking,

Wet through—

I made it home,

Trailing water drops

Down the hall.

 

Finally, dry and warmed,

Dressed in fresh clothes,

I looked outside

To find a pink sky,

With clouds tethered

To the earth like me.

 

Fractured Twilight

Image is my own

https://amanpan.com/2021/07/01/eugis-weekly-prompt-twilight-july-1-2021/

Walking in fractured twilight

Is the smoothest time of light and mind–

A wish made–

To braid reality, this curve of light, with sweetest memory

Thus, so entwined

One begins to hope,

Believing in miracles once again

To spite all fractures made of years.

In the Long Ago So It Goes

image courtesy of istock

 

In the long ago

Youth’s armor

Stripping down fates

In acknowledgements

Of ruined selves

Where someplace we lost

The spare threads

To stitch everything back together

And could never touch another

As we once touched the other,

Letting go dreams

Sprinkled with desires

That only served to choke

The future we swallowed

In gulped decades

While watching dreams

Drift and float like the blown off

Heads of dandelions

Until settling into the

Drudgery of what must be done

In the day to day—

No answers exist when

The only answer is

There be no magic here,

No fairytales, no giants,

No forever’s or an eternity

Yet there be no lies,

No castles built on air,

No innocent beings with wings to rip away

In devilish delight,

No trust found broken

In garbage cans.

 

And so it goes.

 

And so it goes,

In essence,

Neither was what

The other really wanted

Resentments the wooden

Puzzle pieces of a child’s game

Tumbled down over us

In crushing weight

Until only the dust

Of us was left

To be swept away.

 

 

My Silent House

 

My house is a quiet house,

Always various shades of silent—

Though Etta blows silky smoke throughout the rooms,

Though Nina tells me that I know how she feels,

Though Storm Large with Pink Martini might ask me to come sway with her,

And, at times, Freddy proclaims we are, indeed, champions,

While the evening news drones mundane atrocities of the world each day

And the dogs may bark, trying scare the workers across the street away—

My house is silent through it all, echoing noise in its quiet way,

An orderly, meandering contented existence does it hold.

Heaven?

Image courtesy of istock

Tuesday Writing Prompt Challenge June 15, 2021 | Go Dog Go Café (godoggocafe.com)

 

Have I seen Heaven in her eyes?  You ask.

Can anyone see heaven in the eyes of another

Is what I must ask.

 

I have seen love, the soft one,

Take a seat and

Settle comfortably

In the eyes of others.

 

I have seen hatred, the snake,

Uncoil and dance,

Spitting venom at everything and everyone,

From the eyes of others.

 

Too often, I have seen death, the thief,

Steal all the treasures from the eyes

Of those I loved,

Leaving them hollow and emptied out.

 

I have seen other things

In the eyes of others

Along these long years

But heaven—

I don’t really think so.

 

I may be too old to see such a wonder

Or too young yet to know it

When I see it.

 

So, to answer,

I would have to say, no.

No, I have not seen

Heaven in her eyes.

 

The Rabbit

Image courtesy of Unsplash

https://amanpan.com/2021/06/10/eugis-weekly-prompt-nature-june-10-2021

When trying to respond to Eugenia’s prompt this week, this poem, which I posted a couple of years ago kept coming into my head, and no matter how I tried, it would not go away. In this reposting, it is my hope that it serves some purpose. Perhaps, someone will gather something from it.

 

A rabbit stilled,

Motionless, as if frozen

In the summer grass

 

Only her nose twitched, flared

The scent of wrongness–

A touch upon the air,

 

And she knew

Only flight carried safety

Flight, the right choice to make—

If she could only still move.

 

But she could stand only statue still

And standing so, the trap sprung

Steel teeth clamping down,

Slicing through skin,

Chewing through chunks of muscle

As she struggled,

Daring not to scream

As screams would bring the predators.

This she knew too well.

 

The trap now biting into bone,

Her struggles stopped.

Her panting calmed.

Her head rested upon the grass.

One eye looked to a cloudless sky.

She prayed for strength to chew

Through bone.

 

Crescendo

Image is my own

https://sammiscribbles.wordpress.com/category/weekend-writing-prompt/

wk 212 crescendo
 

 

 

Crescendo, sun rise,

Swells an upsurge of color,

Fades too fast for me.

 

Ever loudening,

The business of the day trades

Scenes of memories.

 

Diminuendo comes,

An end, a small death of colors

As day slowly fades.

Washed

At the Beach – Image by KL Caley

https://new2writing.wordpress.com/2021/06/03/writephoto-beach/#like-5743

( An older poem written in 2015 while in Provincetown, MA.  Revised for this week’s writephoto challenge.)

At sunrise over water,

        Remembering as if in a dream  

The child and you and me

As we stood by a sea

Half a world away.

Both of you now baptized differently by my tears.

 

And for and from you,

I am left with things neither given

Nor felt in years,

 Linked by all the fears

To form over a decade of a life

Lived like a stranger

In my own shrinking skin.

 

I have stood

Since the dawn

At this ocean’s edge

Waiting, waiting.

And now at noon

The rain begins.

Fierce pelting blows

Washing me clean

Of all I know

Or dare to dream.

 

For living continues

Within my own skin

 

Dawn

Image courtesy of Pinterest

 

Clouds drift in night’s sky,

Stretching,

As if yearning,

To touch the horizon,

Dawn yet hours away–

She neither “walks in beauty

Like the night” as Byron wrote

Nor does she stand upon a scallop shell

Riding the sea foam to shore

As Botticelli painted—

     No, nothing so over done

Simply, she rises, flaming

Over the desert mountains.

The Willow Trees

Image from Pinterest

https://onewomansquest.org/2021/05g/24/vjs-weekly-challene-trees/

 

In the stillness of days between,

The willows long to reach across the stream,

Breaching distance impossible.

Without the breeze,

Their branches hang in solitude,

Their leaves nearly tears,

Longing drips with want heavy in the air

Until finally—thunder—

Lightning— A breeze teases,

Limbs reaching,

Almost, nearly touching—

And then the wind begins,

Whipping one direction,

Then another, almost swirling,

Limbs, leaves touch

Across the stream

Solitude breached.