The Point is the Light

The Point is the Light

We walk from the temple

after the feast,

down the hill to the car.

Navigating uneven ground, 

I catch a glint between stones: 

black sheen,

and a blue-green inky sliver.

A peacock's chest feather?

The splinter of colour

along its spine

flashes iridescent 

against the surrounding dark.

I turn it this way and that

between finger and thumb —

such a tiny thing —

watching the brightness 

move and spread.

My friend finds another one,

rainbow stripes fanning

wide across the tip.

"They're both yours," she insists.

(Earlier, over dinner,

she helped fend off 

that oaf who tried to hit on me.)

Again, I am asking please for critical feedback on this one. Because it too is from that renga I was part of in 2014, the only items not subject to alteration are the title and last line. (Which, in this instance, pretty much means the whole last verse has to stay.) Apart rom that stipulation – is there anything not working for you, or open to improvement?

Shared via Writers' Pantry #16 at Poets and Storytellers United.

Off the Rails

This is another from the renga I did in 2014 with three other poets. We're doing revisions with the idea of finally publishing them in book form. So I am inviting suggestions, please, for how this one is working and where it might need improvement. Sharing with Writers' Pantry #15 at Poets and Storytellers United.


Off the Rails

Good girl, mostly,

dreams herself

light and white,

fairy-like.

Shivers, though, 

in the night,

when the red

rises inside ...

Or when the black

swirls around her

and she sinks

beneath its tide.

The demons,

the dragons,

the serpents 

invite her.

Tensing her mind,

she locks out

their fearful 

seductions.

So it goes

for the years

of her growing.

Then, explosion.

The rushing red

can't be contained,

the deadly black

won't be denied.

They froth forth

in cataclysmic

eruptions —

then subside.

Slipping and sliding

right off the rails,

she plunges

down the cliff.

Revelation:

she floats on

an ocean

of wondrous calm.

The voices

were always her own.

She opens herself

to their song.

What Links Us

What Links Us

My neighbour is playing his music.

This afternoon our windows 

are closed against the heat

yet still I hear the heavy pulse

of the drum, of my throbbing blood,

my heartbeat, everyone's heart,

across our dividing courtyard.

This morning I swam

in the hydrotherapy pool.

There was my old friend Irwin, 

stretching his herniated discs.

'I can't do this in the river,' he said,

and I remembered all of us swimming 

with him in his river, years ago.

At Christmas I went back

to the town I grew up in.

The hospital there, where I was born

and my little brother was born,

was also where my Nana, who'd held me
in her lap, died. I was four. 

Now I am 74. I still love her.

The handsome lizard in my kitchen —

how did that get in? — didn't scurry away

but kept very still. I opened the back door

and fetched the broom. Could I

manoeuvre it out? I don't like 

killing the creatures. Oh, but this one

was dead already, a gift from the cat.

Do I put these things before you

as question, answer, or neutral description?

Not to instruct you how to think,

let me just tell you what I imagine:

all the trees of the world messaging each other,

their roots connected through earth 

and their branches sharing the air.

This was written in 2014 as part of a renga (a sequence of linked or 'chained' poems) with three other poets. I'm re-posting it here and sharing it at Poets and Storytellers United's Writers' Pantry #14, to see if it can stand alone, out of the original context.