Ferrying

“We’re all working for the Pharaoh”–Richard Thompson

A body
in motion through air–
static, turn-
ing, turning,
sparks reflected on water–
turning into earth–

Adjacent
to the sky, do bones
become light?–
currents that
connect flesh to elements,
inseparable,

Opening
until unseen—sounds
felt, not heard–
veins branching
like trees carrying cells that
nourish, then destroy—

A sudden
change in direction,
drowning and
coming up for
more—impossible to tell
what is or isn’t—

Undarking
the night, withering
the sun—what
grows secret,
exposed by shadow?—what grows
wings, rises, takes flight?

 

This was a response to the challenge image above at The Ekphrastic Review. I immediately thought of 2 things:  the world’s refugees attempting to reach safety by boat, and Richard Thompson’s song “Pharaoh”.

My poem wasn’t chosen, but it inspired a collage in the spirit of my thoughts if not exactly a match to my words.  The winning poems posted on The Ekprastic Review can be found here.

And Richard Thompson…

 

Removing the Obstacles

Inspired by Claudia McGill’s post about revisiting her snippets, I visited the Collage Box Oracle for this response to the Myths of the Mirror February prompt, below.

As with the Magnetic Poetry Oracle, you can have your own ideas, but in the end you need to follow where the word box leads.

Close your eyes and count–
a circumnavigation
out the window and

between the lines to beyond…
dream what’s inside…come to life

 

Fertilization

I arrive in the setting sun—mask of dusk
lifting and merging me into vapor, air
flowered and fearless, singing with agelessness

of birds that echo wordless wishes, on shores
of colored galaxies, swimming to the moon,
currents eddying me to the very core,

turning me into elements, atoms strewn
with fire, with earth, with oceans, with breath, the light
coming from everywhere, vortexed emotion

exposed and whirling in ecstatic surprise
halfway between particled and synthesized

 

A terza rima for Sue Vincent’s photo prompt above.  I had quite a few false starts with this sonnet form.  Loosening up the rhymes helped, but I think I also hadn’t found the right subject.

Sue’s photo in my mind did not really represent something literal, although a number of stories I’ve read in response did well with a literal interpretation.  It felt good to get out my collage box after so long away from it and explore what I saw, and then try to find words that enlarged on that.

 

Year of the Earth Pig 2019

 

What counts as riches?
money garnered from the labors
of others?  A wall?

The breath of wings, air, trees, this
rhythmic ebb and flow, these tides

I couldn’t really get a feel for the Year of the Pig, except that it comes with the idea of wealth, which can be negative (greed) or positive (hard work).  But I think we perhaps need to begin with a different idea of wealth.

February 2019

heavy snow
shoveling away
the solitude
–Rachel Sutcliffe

one set of boot tracks
grey clouds mingle with absence
paths left untrodden

For a long time I started each month with a collage grid and a haiku.  This month, having done a grey February mandala (perhaps next month a grid), I decided to take up Frank Tassone’s challenge to honor poet Rachel Sutcliffe by writing haiku inspired by her words.

his death day
in graveyard shadows
gathered crows
–Rachel Sutcliffe

winter multiplies
voices now lost to the wind
crows calling grey skies

Hopefully the grey will clear out before February’s end…

 

 

 

Near

The end is
calling—ice spiders
weaving nets
blanketing
the unrelenting blueness
with crystal cold

Stripped down
to sheer form, chanting
syllables
bleak, bitter–
ancient songs of Boreas–
untranslatable

Gods become
disassembled bits
and pieces,
illusive
fabrications floating on
seas of sinking air

like final
notes of silence pitched
into the
void, cutting
holes with each unspoken word,
unthreading needles

Failing to
transform, to be borne
or reborn–
the years spin,
contracting—the lines
fall, disconnected

A poetic response to the January prompt at Myths of the Mirror, above.  Somehow working in blues always leads me to stitching…in this case I painted two circles and cut the smaller one up and stitched it on top of the larger one.

Also linking to dVerse Open Link Night.

 

Poem up at The Ekphrastic Review

My poem, Number 7, inspired by the Anne Ryan collage of the same name, is up at The Ekphrastic Review, along with eleven other varied and interesting poetic responses. My thanks to Lorette Luzajic for selecting and posting my work, and for providing a wonderful forum for ekphrastic poetry and art.

The mandala, above, was also inspired by Anne Ryan’s art.  You can read more about her and see more of her work here.

October 2018 Currents

 

circle stops, becomes
a point that reappears, falls
evasive, rilling

dancing with currents, a leaf–
pausing on the patterned wind

It took me quite awhile to do my monthly grid.  I wanted to do very tiny squares, but I kind of lost control of the amount.  I intended a small piece of work, but my intentions and results often have different ideas.  Also, I never realized how much uninterrupted time it takes just to go through my bins of cut up paper and decide what to use.  At any rate, it was conveniently finished in time to do a tanka for Colleen’s Tanka Tuesday, poet’s word choice.  I will pick rilling for one, and then currents.  That’s October 2018.

I could have spent a lot more time messing around with these images in Photoshop, but unfortunately, or luckily, I didn’t have it.  So: two versions of October’s circular grid.  The first is done from a scanned image, the second from a photo (the entire collage wouldn’t fit in the scanner).  The color and texture are totally different. Light has many ways of changing what we see.

Linked to Open Link Night at dVerse

 

Poems and Art at “the song is…”

Marianne Szlyk, at “the song is…” has posted 3 of my poems with accompanying artwork as part of her tribute to musicians born in the 50s.  The Prince and Police-inspired work appeared on the blog, but the Stevie Wonder-inspired art and poem are new.

She also has some wonderful musical links at the bottom of the post (as she always does), and I’d just like to quote from Stevie, first from the song “As”, and then from his words, spoken before he sang that song at Aretha Franklin’s Homegoing service.

“Change your words into truths
And then change that truth into love”

“Let’s make LOVE great again”

Thanks, Marianne, for featuring my work, and for your continuing support of music, art, and words.

You can see the post here.

 

September 2018/Leaf Koan

almost dusk—color
deepens and rustles insect song–
thick light frosts the wind.

For Colleen’s 100th Tanka Tuesday celebration, she asked us to choose our own words for our poems.  I consulted the magnetic Oracle in two ways for my September leaf grid–the online one, and my refrigerator one, which is currently filled with Zen words.  Two very different views of the season.

between finding out
and insight lives the whispered
silence of why not