June 2023

June butterflies days
with peripheral visions–
fleeting shadowed light

June butterflies days
with makeshift impermanence–
colors cast in dreams

of peripheral visions–
horizons weave time
into salty sea-sky wind,

fleeting shadowed light
tinged with endings—summer melts
backwards into fall

Colleen’s Tanka Tuesday prompt had us taking a test to determine our spirit animal. Butterfly was my answer yesterday, although if I took the test today it would probably be different. My answer to most questions of this type are “it depends”. But I’m not displeased–butterflies are wonderful creatures.

I wrote a troiku turning butterfly into a verb, as requested by Sarah for her prompt at dVerse. I also used words from this week’s Oracle 2 Random Word Generator.

winged surprise startles
as it alights on my arm–
the world pauses, stilled

The collages are old ones from the 70s that I discovered in my archives.

March 2023 (Mad as a March Hare)

Time sinks into quicksand,
manipulated and migrated
by determined legislation–
spring ahead—reset your clocks!

Manipulated and migrated,
Sun surveys Earth with amusement
and continues to keep its own hours.

The determined legislation
impels no change to Sun’s path,
the space it occupies, or how it is viewed.

Spring ahead—reset your clocks!
(The birds will not forget to tell you
when it’s time to rise and shine.)

The Wombwell Rainbow has been posting a weekly poetic form challenge which I always mean to do. This week Paul is asking for poetry that uses idioms. Although it’s the autumn time change that really irritates me, as I dislike the day ending at 3pm, I noted on my March calendar that we will lose an hour of sleep when we “spring ahead” this month. I used the trimeric form which was from a challenge weeks ago, but as you know, I like repetitive forms.

I also used words from the Random Word List.

I did do my usual monthly grid, but using one of the Year of the Rabbits seemed more appropriate to both the month and the poem. And somehow a bird always fits.

February 2023 Imbolc

wearing light–
wind-startled, weightless,
wave-weaving
messengers
ablaze in opposition
to monochrome days

breath held in
the beating heart, veins
threaded with
shimmering
roots, marking the season with
anticipation

gates open
and skies expand, meet,
intersect,
cross between, entwining
elements seeded into
manifestation

the path shifts–
shadowed and cast out
ward, burning
the before
into a now that transforms,
emerged, as after

One of the recent Kick-About prompts was Christo and Jeanne-Claude. This reminded me of their Gates installation in Central Park in February 2005, and I pulled out some of the photos I had taken then, printed them, and cut them into squares to make grids. I did not think of it at the time, as my daughter and I delighted in following the winding paths, as a ritual experience for the mid-point between winter and spring–yet it felt magical, like a journey into a different world. A transformation of a familiar landscape, a stilling of time.

A gate, like a threshold, is a symbol of crossing between paths of light and darkness. The fabric of the gates was constantly in motion, holding inside them the play of light with water, sky, ground, and bare trees. A fortuitous snowfall added to the magic. I don’t know if Christo and Jeanne-Claude had Imbolc in mind at all when they planned The Gates (they were supposedly inspired by Japanese temple gates), but in both time and place it contained a strong resonance with the return of color and the anticipation of spring.

For earthweal, where Brendan has asked us to think about Imbolc, and how it shows up in our lives.

January 2023

night sky
wide with starry
moonrise, floating inside
cloud-waves that pulse, primal,
elemental,
unknown

Happy New Year!

December 2022/Icebound

gravel roads follow
me, my feet covered
in ice, blinding wind
blankets the sky, eyes
immersed in elsewhere—

clouds waver
the horizon, wisps
of images scatter
me moonfaced
across the dark window—

I am beyond
ripe for picking, afraid
of falling into the midst
of an isolated
silence, stuck in solitude–

waiting for a pinprick
of light to gather
me in, a reminder
of what lies
fallow, waiting—

not growing yet, but
hushed, all aquiver, molecules
cocooned inside
themselves, waiting,
dancing wildly—

layers shifting, waiting
to become repatterned, re
arranged over and under,
waiting—this is the way
of healing, beginning, return

For December, where Brendan at earthweal has asked us to consider The Witch of Winter.

September 2022

end of summer–
still sweltering and tired
of the relentless sun

gratis, an impulse to channel
ancient oceanic immersion
keeps me company

I draw on memories
of sand as floor,
the harmony of waves

water flashes through me
like a train I’ve boarded
that has abandoned its tracks

adjoining these ruminations
is an unmasked eagerness
for the refreshing chill of autumn

but I wonder if the shape
of the year still exists–
or if it will always be now

flooded, burning at the edges–
marching into the pages of a book
we didn’t mean to write

I consulted the Oracle 2 words Jane generated this week for my September circle/grid poem. The shape of time seems to get more distorted by the day.

July 2022

neither brave nor free–
our leaders bow down to Mammon,
cast life aside

Find the cost of freedom
buried in the ground
Mother Earth will swallow you
lay your body down

June 2022

slipknot
the thought

ready to fade away–
the story lost, mislaid

between image and words—falling,
asking to be caught up, calling—

and if it were–
what then?—now here,

now unconfined, a seed
to open, finally freed—

surprise breaks through
in green and blue

After I saw Muri’s hexaduad the other day I wanted to try one. I took a rough poem I wrote recently, and revised it to fit. It’s a pretty flexible form, despite the rhymes.

We’ve had so much rain and so little very hot weather that it’s lush and green here in NYC to begin June.

April 2022

inner visions waiting to
be seen suddenly
present as if what the earth
imagined and what
now exists had no border
between them at all

February 2022

The snow gathers everywhere, grown from nothing, reflecting the hidden sun like feathers dancing. I awaken to a world both light and dark, suspended in the wind. I can’t see the morning moon behind the whirling veil, but I know it is a waning crescent, almost new.

At night, I light candles and think of those lost to me, all the spirits now absent from this world. Do I only imagine that I hear their voices singing on the currents of the stormtides? Inside my memories I assemble the seeds they entrusted to me, promise to plant them in the unfolding aurora of spring.

cold winter nights—sky
dazzles to infinity–
translucid, complete

For the new month, the New Moon, and dVerse Haibun Monday, hosted by Frank, where the subject is winter.