In the Candlelight

 

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For Shutterday (prompt: fire)

The Light Above

A Georgia Nocturne

Observing from within the darkened living room,
Your grandmother is treated to a pantomime
Of youthful bliss: mason jar, dusk, eager child.

It’s early evening, and the tree frogs raise their voices
In divine song, thrumming a rhythm that you
Dance to as you chase the emerald glow of the fireflies.

And now it’s just the land and the gathering gloom
And the song and the lights and you,
A celestial concerto you feel in your bones.

The quality of the performance is such that
All illusion of separation falls away -
You and the world are one.

One bold lightning bug alights on your wrist
And you jiggle your arm, testing its temerity.
It stays. You can feel it still.

 

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Again this week I decided to try folding a number of prompts into one poem. It’s a great challenge! So, this was written for Poets United (prompt: nighttime); Poetic Bloomings (prompt: animal, vegetable or mineral – I chose firefly); The Sunday Whirl (prompt wordle words used: emerald, celestial, bones, rhythm, divine, illusion, pantomime, observe) and Three Word Wednesday (prompt words: early, jiggle, quality).

Balcony Tomato’s Lament

 

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Bereft of love, I am doomed by your whim
To bear forevermore fortune’s heartless
Theft of the wide world from my seeking roots,
True home that now lies far below my reach.
For want of bees I submit to your hands,
Their graceless shaking of my blossoms a
Poor substitute for the sublime buzzing
Whereby I was meant to grow fruit-swollen.
Still, my life was meant for this: to produce,
And so I will not resist my instincts.
Fill your watering can, pour me rivers,
Stand me in the sun – I’ll grow tall for you.
Love of a kind fate may yet feel for me:
Above the distant earth the wind blows free.

 

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As part of my re-entry into writing, I thought I’d take on an expanded challenge this week, and see if I could fold several prompts into one poem – written for Poetry Tow Truck (prompt: backwards sonnet – first word rhymes); The Sunday Whirl (prompt wordle words used: world, whim, river, resist, buzz, instinct) and We Write Poems (prompt: write in another’s voice).

What Remains

Cicadas intone
Songs of my Georgia childhood
Half-remembered now
I hear my grandmother’s voice
Calling me homeward again

 

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Poets Online prompt: tanka on summer and love

When I Dream of Clover

On Mass and Matter (revised)

She was only eight years old
When they taught her how to hate her body,

Made her memorize the inverse proportional rule
For calculating worth pound by pound.

She was such a smart child that she
Learned it faster than any of the other girls,

Even the skinny ones who excelled at rote recitation
Of the you-don’t-matter you-don’t-matter formula,

But who failed the inward directional practicum
Which had earned her the highest marks overall.

And everyone was impressed by how
Thoroughly she’d learned the lesson

That only leggy women in magazines
Were permitted any embodied pleasure,

But secretly her parents wondered where
Their wild and beautiful daughter had gone.

 

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For We Write Poems (prompt: revise a previously written poem) and One Stop Poetry.
I’m easing my way back into writing by way of revising, and am happy to be back!

The poem in its original form can be found here.

Advice

Don’t tamper with the story, child.
Let the world be what it is.
A pretty word or two won’t
Scrub the ugliness from it,
Nor will a clever turn of phrase
Make more sense of it than
It rightly owns.

The end is imminent for us all-
Our lives span but a single breath
Of an earth grown long in the tooth.
We live, and then we die.
And somewhere in between
Perhaps we make a tiny mark
To leave for those who will come next,
As if to say, Here it was that I once stood.

Pray the mark you leave is one
Of betterment, a small brightening at least -
The world is sore in need of light,
Engulfed as it is in fear,
These days as it ever was.
So whatever you choose to do,
Make it count, child.

Make it count.

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Three Word Wednesday prompt: engulf, imminent, tamper

Wordless Murder Mystery

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I sometimes moonlight as a still photographer for film shoots – primarily for the web series my husband writes – and this is a favorite from a recent shoot.

What Comes After

It started out as a feeling
Which then grew into a hope.

Feelings are fickle you know -
A smile will travel with you only for a while,
Offering a brief respite from your trouble,
But hope! Hope has a way of taking root

Somewhere down in the darkness,
Planted far too deep to ferret out,
And then you’re changed
Whether you know it yet or not

Into someone with a path to follow,
Someone who knows in her bones that
Grief is a vast shadowland, it’s true,
But it does have its border.

And now you know you’ll cross it someday,
Emerging finally into a world
Where clouds blot out the sun
Only every now and then,

And only to provide rainwater
For all the living that carries on below.

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for Carry On Tuesday