I remember the huge puff
that blew the dandelion seeds
all
off
to fly away on the air,
and you had to
get the lot
in one whoosh.
I can’t
remember why –
any of it.
Something
about love … ?
Do you think
I’m getting
old?
A quadrille for dVerse's Q251 Light Burst of Air
(A quadrille is a poem of 44 words excluding title. And including one compulsory word, in this case 'puff'.)
The Guadalupe was green.
Soft green, as if cloudy.
Not transparent, but secret,
glowing with inward light.
I sat with Anne
on large, flat stones
extending into the water.
The Guadalupe was green.
We watched three tall black birds
forage, from stones in the centre.
We spoke of poetry, Reiki,
friendship, and being blessed
to live in places of beauty.
The Guadalupe was green,
almost turquoise that night
alongside the wooden veranda
where our restaurant table
was full of new friends, good talk,
red wine, and feasting.
The Guadalupe was green.
He swung his truck to a stop, unplanned,
for a river walk in the sun.
We laughed with a little boy, and
a small happy dog … pretending we could be
always ... knowing we could not.
The Guadalupe was a shade of green
I’ve never, anywhere else, seen matched.
Stranger, I longed to merge
with the depths and bends
of that river, to stay connected
forever. Perhaps I did.
Written for Poets and Storytellers United's Friday Writings #235, where we're invited to write about a body of water that holds a special place in our heart. I'm a river lover: mainly the Tamar in Launceston, Tasmania, where I grew up, and the Tweed in Northern Rivers, NSW, where I now live. But I've also fallen in love with some rivers in places I've only visited, most notably the dramatic Urubamba in Peru, and the mystical Guadalupe in Texas, USA.
This gilded and silvered copper disk reveals
outstretched wings and grasping talons,
inlaid eyes of shell and turquoise,
light reflecting off contrasting movement.
The Moche (the Mohicas) flourished
six centuries: from Nepena River Valley
perhaps as far north as Piura River.
There was no tradition of writing –
the precise significance of owls
at the burial site of Loma Tegra
is unknown. (Owls prey, fly at night ...)
Of mystical or divine power,
Owl is my guardian on my left side.
(On my right I have Serpent.)
Written for Poets and Storytellers United at Friday Writings #234: Words for Images, this is largely an erasure poem taken from the long text about this artwork at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The erasing leaves me with some quite big chunks of sequential words from the original and also qualifies as a found poem. Only the last two lines, italicised to differentiate them from the rest, are my own words. (I did also place the third line of the third verse a little out of its original order. It makes more sense this way in this context – and I so wanted to use it, for the wonderful sounds of the words as they roll over the tongue.)
Image and text are in public domain, open access.