In the Garden

These days my poems come strangely and awkwardly, like a teenager into their lengthened limbs. 

In the Garden

My hands covered in dirt till the soil, reaching

growing downward like roots. You question the foundations

of my faith – that which I have built myself upon

as I plant carrots and beets. I smile upward as the sun

strokes my hair and back. Its warmth comforts and envelops

my little leaves spiraling out from my stem. Your raincloud,

refreshing, quenches my thirst and feeds my willowy limbs.

Only as the sun reappears do you find me in bloom.

River Sketches

Today was the first day that we got out to the trail. Our trail. I got to sit out at the river a bit and get a few words onto paper. It's nothing much - just the things that float through one's head while listening to the water flow:

Softly the waterfall of thoughts turns

to white noise, gurgling and flowing past me.

Slowly beneath the surface fish spot their prey

settling on the surface tension

                                    PLOP

                                    nothing left but waves

---

Leaves drop one by one into the current

drifting lazily, then picking up speed,

never knowing when the tipping edge will come

to toss them, turn them asunder.

---

From among the greens a peacock flutter,

dragonflies cloud my vision

Book Challenge Update

I did not get a chance to update my book challenge yet this week. I finished The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. 


I must say, I really love this story. It's, of course, a great growing story full of morals and directives about how to be a good person, how to help children be good people and the loveliness and lessons we can learn from gardening. LOVE IT! 


It makes me want even more to start my own greenhouse. It's a pet idea that I've had floating around the back of my mind for a few years. 


Anyways - back to the book. I finished it Tuesday and began reading Little Women for the third time. It's another book I love. Alcott has such interestingly eternal thoughts. Plus, it is hard to pull me away from the transcendentalists (but not as difficult as it is pulling them away from Unitarian thought... hahaha ha ha.... no one gets my literary joke or finds it funny.


Thus, I have completed the twelfth book on my journey to tri-deca-dom. Or something like that. 


12/30 books completed.

Vapid Aphrodite

A post I got to via lovelinks, by Patricia over at Contemplating Happiness about people watching pushed me over the edge this morning. I went on one of the most lovely Easter Sunday walks to a zoological/botanical garden this year and along the way I picked up (in my writer's mind) a woman, whom I've charmingly named the "Vapid Aphrodite". 

Vapid Aphrodite

We walked through the gardens with spring all abloom

Our fingers meeting in between camera captures, lovely

and bright, the flowers, cranes and flamingos strutting

their best jeweled plumage in the afternoon warmth

We hold the camera at arms’ length, heads together

faces smiling with a light that is not all from above

A sheer mist from the fountain cools our faces, frenzies

of children splash and give chase in the delight

The clicking of another camera comes to our ears

from a fellow being directed by a tall and fair woman

She presents an orange-flowered tree for the camera

as a showcase showgirl presenting her latest wares

The sun illuminates her sun-bleached mop, her lips

too pink, painted as though she could be done up better,

Nature’s beauty undone, she holds her lover’s smile

too long, telling tales of perspiration and aching feet

The corners of her mouth fall with the camera lens,

gone until the photographer glances back up grinning

He leans in for her lips, but she presents a rouged cheek,

looking determinedly for her next ware to showcase.

Comments welcome.  :)

Autumn

Autumn 

It just happens one day, I wake up

and I can breathe in a deep breath

the air is different, heavy and moist

with the smell of dying leaves

never do humans find death so beautiful

as they do each autumn

the earth slowly shutting itself down

for the hibernation months ahead

this – this is when I come alive,

when all else is veiled in tragic beauty




Comments welcome.


Photo by author.

Heaven Bent

P&W prompt number 8 for me (as usual thanks to Angelspeak):


Choose a cliched phrase (“fit as a fiddle,” “think out of the box,” “running on empty,” etc.) and turn it around. Use the new meaning created by this reversal to fuel a poetic meditation.


I decided to use the phrase "Hell-bent for leather" which is sometimes shortened to "Hell-bent", meaning to be going very fast. I changed the phrase to "Heaven-bent" and slowed it down a bit.

Heaven Bent

He walked the trail upward ahead of me

taking the landscape one pace at a time, 

slowing his stride imperceptibly to give me

the chance to catch up as I panted behind

"Why do you always pick the highest

climb you can find on the trail?" I asked,

wondering if I would get any reply this time

 mentally counting the hundreds before

Patiently he climbed, taking time to breathe,

time to live and experience each moment 

of the unhurried ascent, early afternoon sun 

shining around his blonde locks like a halo 

Puffing to catch up where I'd fallen back

I scrambled up a yet steeper, shorter path

only to stumble and scrape both knees 

with a tight wince, but not a sound escaping

A solid hand reached out to help - I took it

gratefully after my rash moment, pain subsiding

the steady calm of him capturing me completely 

"From up there we can touch the heavens."

Comments welcome.

Alarm Sounding

Today I addressed another P&W prompt (picked up from Angelspeak). 

Write a sonnet, a fourteen-line poem made up, typically, of three stanzas of four lines, and a fourth of two lines, or a couplet. Use the following rhyme scheme: In each of the first three stanzas, rhyme the first and third lines and the second and fourth lines (a, b, a, b, c, d, c, d, e, f, e, f); and rhyme the lines of the couplet (g, g). For a traditional example, see Shakespeare’s ”From you have I been absent in the spring….”For a contemporary example, see Denis Johnson’s ”Heat.”

For the record, I really dislike this prompt. Sonnets – what a pain in the butt. Really. I spent more than a hour counting and recounting feet of poetry on my fingers while trying to think of rhymes that didn’t sound silly. I’m not sure I succeeded. I will, no doubt, re-write this poem to capture something much better in the near future. (Note – this reads better if you add a brief caesura after the word stillness of line 5.)

Alarm Sounding

The silent snowy hills of arctic light

are full of trees immeas’rable in worth

The summer days leave so few hours of night

or living things to walk upon this earth.

Through stillness now suddenly emerges

the sound of living earth, it tears and rends

Earth shattering, through stone and rock surges

a force that more than mother natures bends.

The cry – the breaking of an arctic shelf

a severing of earth sounds the alarm

a crime on nature in and of itself

a thing it seems no living thing could harm

A crime that we should kill the wilderness

by living lives that venture to excess.

Comments are welcome, as always.