#healing – Hearing The Mermaids Sing

No Lexicon

https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/20204174/posts/3955628331

There exists no lexicon

For the echoes of emptiness here–

Where the azaleas bloom

Purple, pink, and white,

While dusty looking

Lavender sends up

Multiple spikes,

As roses yield up

Open, thirsting mouths

To the sky.

Though the soil here

Nourishes color and green

Growing things,

While life appears

Apparently abundant,

Although neighbors smile and wave,

The soil remains absent of truth, of meaning,

Of love—of a spirit—of a soul.

No lexicon exists for the emptiness

Echoing throughout the soil

In this place.

The Woman Who Remembered the Taste of Apricots

First published in Pinecone Review’s Be Proud With Pride edition


The woman lied to herself.
Said life is not had without hope,
Believing hope resided within her chest
Just under the bones,
As she remembered the taste
Of fresh apricots,
The sweetness of their juices
Bursting in her mouth,
The texture of their pulp
Playing against her tongue—
She remembered—
Fresh apricots 
During the weeks of summer
In the year the earth awoke,
Stretching and yawning,
Turning as if 
To bring sunrises closer
And hold sunsets dear—
That summer the girl,
Holding beating hope,
Emerged from the cracks forming 
In the left side
Of the woman’s chest.
Thus, the woman who lied
About holding onto hope,

Crumpled and died,
Shriveled like the over-ripened apricots
On the ground beneath the tree in your yard.
The girl, holding hope, emerged
Laughing with joy at all the smiling
Universe seemed for once to offer up
In the taste of apricot flesh
And the sweet juice that quenched thirst
After years of waiting want.

The earth tilted back, turning once again,
Withdrawing from sunrise and sunset.
Then the apricots were gone.
Picked, fallen to the ground,
Nibbled by birds and squirrels.
The girl, who held hope, 
Shrank down, curling into a fetal position,
Within the dead woman who lied
About having hope and who
Was now revived, resuscitated,
Like a cannibal feeding off a beaten enemy
Of faith, of pain, of living hope,
By the now shrunken head like girl,
Who had held beating hope 
That could beat no longer
As the revived woman remembered
Always—
The taste, the feel of the flesh of fresh apricots.

When the Familiar Dies

Image courtesy of TheSpruce.com

wk 238 familiar — https://sammiscribbles.wordpress.com/category/weekend-writing-prompt/

She walks to the end

of dark uncurling days

at the edge of the earth,

witnesses the new day

split open–

petals soft,

beautiful.

She’d give it to herself

could it be contained,

arranged within some vase,

held within her hands,

that cannot hold

such flowering strength.

She breathes in hope,

taking it deep into her lungs

where oxygen mingles

with blood and becomes one—

a seed took root in the moment

as all things familiar to her die.

Dying Magnolia Tree

The magnolia tree is dead or dying
Said the experts at the nursery
Which planted it.
No green leaves hang upon it,
Only these brittle, brown things
Cling to its limbs still.

The experts give me two things,
Free of charge of course,
To try to resuscitate my magnolia.
The experts tell me everything to do
Over the next eight weeks,
But not to worry, if it all doesn’t work,
The tree will be replaced.  It’s guaranteed.

A guarantee I never thought I’d need.
I did everything right:
Watering and fertilizing,
Watering and fertilizing,
Factoring in all the rain—
Yet here it stands dead or dying
In this place you never knew.

Like with you, in the place you knew,
I did everything I knew to do—
Replace the cooking pots and pans with stainless,
Only organic foods, red wine the only alcohol,
Broke all the cigarettes in two,
Quit my job to care for you—
Until—

Until the fourth time it returned,
Spread to the lungs and liver,
You wanted your cigarettes and alcohol back.
How could I argue?  Say no to that?
Yet even then—
I found you cigarettes with no additives, organic tobacco too.

Until January, our magnolia bloomed as you lay dying,
When at midnight a storm blew through,
Minutes later, you died 
And the magnolia shed its blooms.	

So here now, in this new place,
I planted a magnolia in memory
     Of what was, what was not,
     Of what could have been, should have been,
     Of what would have been
If I possessed the magic to shape shift
Into the one you most wanted.

And now, this tree in this new place
Stands dead or dying.

But I will do as the experts say:
     Spray from top to bottom for disease,
     Shock the roots every other week
Until mid- November, hoping to bring it back,
Bring it back from the edge of death.

If I can’t, the nursery will replace it
With another magnolia tree.

Yet I must think on that.
In this place, in this soil, perhaps
A magnolia is not meant to be.

I may ask them to replace it
With a different tree.
For it could be,
That here and now,
Magnolias are no longer meant for me.

An Autumnal Baptism

Caught in the evening downpour,
I am washed clean of summer.
Summer’s red rock, red dirt dreams
Sluiced from me with this autumnal drenching.

Morning greets me with a cool hand
Of sunshine upon my brow.
Autumn whispers of a harvest
Under skies of bluest topaz.

A clear, clean, honest reaping
In days yet to be had.

Bouquets of the Ramshackle

wk 227 ramshackle — https://sammiscribbles.wordpress.com/2021/09/18/weekend-writing-prompt-227-ramshackle/

https://amanpan.com/category/eugis-prompts/

With ramshackle shards
Of heart, soul, self
Falling away like the browned petals
Of a long-wilted bouquet,
We create a riotous noise
In ramshackle attempts
To find some connection.

Lumbering, awkward attempts
At reaching out to touch once again,
To replace, to freshen 
The brown wilted and missing parts
With new bouquets of spring
Whose stems sit in eternally
Fresh, clean waters.

We dream of a life lived
No longer ramshackle,
With no long-wilted bouquets
Of a past to haunt with falling petals,
But a life returning whole,
To move without noise
Through the world once again.

Freedom of Wings

Haunting seen
In darkening clouds
Of chrysalis dreams
Where wanting,
Where desiring,
Haunt seen
Cease existing--
In this capturing
No ring 
pierced through
Butterfly wings
Dripping still
From newly emerging
Dreams not tended.

Fractured Twilight

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

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.

The Embroideress

Like some ancient voodoo priestess,

Fears sits and smiles from her rocking chair.

Tilting her gray head to her work at hand,

Fear embroiders in red thread

The narratives of my old scars.

She stitches in orange and green thread

The flowers of my poorly made cobwebbed choices.

She stitches in black thread

The vanquished vines of all my loss and pain.

She stitches in yellow thread

Her flowers of caution at the edges,

All the while chanting an ancient spell,

Giving her stitched yellow flowers

Magic to steal any power in the air,

Paralyzing– daring the pulse.

Fear stitches away in red thread

On the last cloth of daring I’ve left,

And I, I am paralyzed by the stitching made.

	tmezpoetry on My Mother’s Stories
	Annette Kalandros on My Mother’s Stories
	tmezpoetry on My Mother’s Stories
	Anonymous on No Lexicon
	Annette Kalandros on No Lexicon

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First published in Pinecone Review’s Be Proud With Pride edition

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Image courtesy of TheSpruce.com

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