This Moment Pictured

At Poets and Storytellers United's Weekly Scribblings #45 Magaly invites us to be inspired by one or more of these three pictures:

"Beautiful YOU are" by Magic Love Crow

"Delightful Donkey" by Gina Morley

"Carnival Dreams" by Shelle Kennedy

(I chose them all.)

This Moment Pictured

The great bird is soaring

in blazing splendour,

lifting our gaze away

from the small donkey 

left standing exposed – 

which once looked so cute,

with the crown on his head

and the cross displayed on 

his proud brow, but now 

seems only foolish.

And we do gaze,

with eyes that have seen 

much trouble, but 

are wide open because of 

all we could not 

go on looking away from.

We open our hearts –

revived, hopeful, triumphant –

and hold them high 

like flags.

Notes from the Log of the SS Enterprise?

Notes from the Log of the SS Enterprise?

The eye of calm is roughly surrounded.

High clouds show up brightly

clear or obscured by stark mechanics,

ragged intensity rapidly intensifying.

Prone to fluctuations,

large eyes become sustained.

Thunderstorms form and gather.

Rainbands start rotating, updrafts drop.

Outside the forming eye,

pushing air flows inward to descend.

Many aspects remain a mystery.

A ring ejects excess air.

A clear simple drop in speed –

rising and sinking columns of air

may strengthen and organize, 

"choked" partially, quickly abandoned.

The moat between eyeballs 

changes the distance. Filamentation zones

near any vortex are pronounced strong. 

Visible rotational suction may be else.

Unusual cyclones remain stationary.

Storm phenomena spawn 

individual convective cells.

Tornadic landfall can allow circulations.

It is a curve with height, resembling 

a dome smallest at the bottom.

An absent maximum, typically,

wavelengths from space.

An aircraft flying is a common mistake,

especially to exit the violent opposite.

Polar lows are relatively warm.

Water can feature deep winds.

At the boundary of different

are extratropical classic severe clouds.

Low systems can be very hazardous.

The fastest winds are multiple.

All are theorised to have doppler velocity.

Observations on the south pole of Saturn

display tens of kilometers high spacecraft:

locked, clearly defined, not previously seen.

On any planet, observe a great red spot, 

very large, on both poles. The mission: 

to have a dipole eye structure. See also 

portal, radius, maximum wind. Surge!

Written for Weekly Scribblings #44: Eye of the Hurricane at Poets and Storytellers United. 

Uninspired, I tried an erasure poem taken from the Wikipedia article Eye (cyclone). (Hurricane, cyclone and typhoon are all words for the same kind of tropical storm, called different names in different places.) I had fun arriving at a lot of scientific-sounding pretentious nonsense, then the mention of Saturn gave me a different perspective as to what I had actually found.

Image: Public Domain. 
Hurricane Isabel as seen from the International Space Station showing a well-defined eye at the center of the storm. Courtesy of Mike Trenchard, Earth Sciences & Image Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center. From his vantage point high above the Earth in the International Space Station, Astronaut Ed Lu captured this broad view of Hurricane Isabel. The image, ISS007-E-14750, was taken with a 50 mm lens on a digital camera.

My Breasts

My Breasts

I no longer want

the high, jutting breasts 

of adolescence.

I like the hang 

of these breasts now,

the convex under-curve

the concave upper,

perfectly matched:

oh beautiful half-moon.

If the whim takes me

they can sit on my palms,

a perfect fit.

I don’t pull on them

as a man or a baby might;

I simply hold, stroke gently.

I make no demands

of my elderly, 

still-smooth breasts.

I used to think them

wrong, too small. Now

they comfort me.

 

 

Written in November 2020. Sharing in January 2021 with Poets and Storytellers United's #Writers' Pantry #53.

Poem for Beltane Night

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poem for Beltane Night

This Beltane is marked by storms.

Much later, all quieted, I go out

to find the full moon high behind trees –

blue moon this month – and next to her,

clear, close as a lover, Mars.

This night I have no lover of my own 

to help me celebrate. Even the cats are all gone

who used to come with me at midnight

into the circle of my patch of earth, my garden 

and my sacred trees, to greet the moon.

Yet the whole earth pulses with love

in this time of alive silence: a throb beyond

our ears to hear, yet not beyond our feeling.

The street, empty of people, is full 

of presences co-existing, just out of sight.

They come in peace. I greet them so.

Somewhere else, there is fighting,

there is pain, there is death, there is grief.

Tomorrow I may have to face them,

those conditions, but tonight –

I stand in love. My heart embraces the Universe 

as my hand blows a kiss to the moon.

Inside, I pour a nip of ginger wine.

I write a poem for Beltane. (Poetry as fertility.)

Pieces of dark chocolate melt in my mouth.

 

Photo © Roxanne Robins 2020, used with permission (for this use only).

See also revised (expanded) version.

 

Sharing with Writers' Pantry #44 at Poets and Storytellers United.

Worried Clocks Carry the Dream

Worried Clocks Carry the Dream

Worried clocks carry the dream within my body,

my body defiant, disbelieving the dream –

the dream someone else’s possibility, ending you.

You ask that person: Be the mother that is under, a gift. 

A gift! Accept!

Accept our life start, that is unavoidable –

unavoidably working towards wanting,

wanting a little window into connection, focus.

Focus on the fullness to be true; further open.

Further open a kind allow.

Allow whispering; process challenge.

Challenge this insight happening,

happening into the pleasure.

Pleasure sending sensations, wonder, tangled endings.

Tangled endings just beautiful vibrations.

Vibrations, harnessing, feel like the ocean –

the ocean to bring. Begin!

Begin with their beauty.

I wrote this for my own prompt, Weekly Scribblings #43: Found Poems and Erasures, at Poets and Storytellers United. I am quite good at other kinds of found poems, not so good at erasures, so I thought that's what I should try. Hmmm, perhaps not!  I really don't think I have the knack. (But then, I admit I didn't spend a serious amount of time on it. I didn't even actually erase the text surrounding the words I chose.) I only got it to make some kind of almost-sense by repeating the one or two words at the end of every line as the beginning of the next line. Below are the source materials: pages from a give-away New Agey magazine which is basically advertising various practitioners. The first attempt didn't take me very far, so I turned to another page and did some more.

Interestingly enough, what this poem does is allow me a window into my own subconscious. Recently I've been thinking about my relationship with my mother – it was her birthday the other day – wishing it had been easier, closer. As a child, I thought her very beautiful but didn't find her warm and cuddly. I felt she was always trying to make me conform, be something I wasn't. I've come to think I may have misunderstood her, and wish I could go back and make it all different. I can find these threads in the poem, so one day I might, if I choose, rewrite it to be more readily understandable to others.

Encountering Old Bones: 2.

Encountering Old Bones: 2

(For episode 1, go back here.)

‘Human bone?’ I said, ‘How can you tell?’ Sure, the man was a doctor, but he was talking about bone that had been shaped and carved.

‘I’m not that smart,’ he said. ‘We found a note in his vest pocket. If anything happened to him, he wanted the rosary returned to the family of the woman the bone came from: the family of Lily Vallee. He was looking for them, apparently. But it’s no name from round here.’

‘That sounds like a made-up name,’ said Ben, the newspaper man. ‘A stage name, maybe?’

‘GRUESOME FIND ON DEAD MAN’ read the headline. As sheriff, I made some posters with the details. Our little local paper wouldn’t reach very far. We used an artist’s drawing of the dead man’s face; he never told his own name, but maybe someone would recognise him.

I locked the rosary away but I used to look at it sometimes, and even handle it, wondering about the woman whose body was pilfered for such a ghoulish souvenir, and the man who carried it. Was it love or revenge that motivated him? Guilt or duty spurring his quest for her relatives? Was he even the one who stole the bone?

What if it wasn’t stolen? Maybe it was her dying wish, a charge she laid upon him. Then why would he take it on – unless they were close? Lovers, I thought of course. Or … mother and son? Father and …? Brother …? 

Years later a new teacher arrived. She read the old poster still hopefully decorating the notice-board.

‘Did someone take it that seriously?’ she said, aghast.

A well-known trick, she told us, out where she came from. Skin someone of his money by whispering a ‘secret’ history about a rosary in the pawnshop and a family who’d pay a fortune for the last relic of a child abducted by Indians years before. Not a word of truth in it of course. Every so often some fool who thought he was clever would pay much too much for the rosary, in hope of a great reward. After he’d properly left town, a replacement would go on display. They were carved from the bones of dead cattle.

369 words, shared in Writers' Pantry #43 at Poets and Storytellers United. Many thanks to Magaly Guerrero, and to she whom we know as Magical Mystical Teacher, for the inspiration which proved to me I can write fiction after all! (It's a bit of a cop-out ending, sorry – but taking it anywhere else would have meant at least one more episode and I don't know that I have the perseverance for that.)