Happy National Poetry Day everyone!
Photography Luca Zanon
Mirage
When answers shift like grains of sand
twists to tongue like traders in a foreign land
Truth becomes a camel
sucking sustenance deep into enamel
sifting for parsing hopes
built on childish slopes;
it will last
until the next repast
humanity colored with invisible ink—mirage
success would never dare presage.
The old man glimpses ore
in earthen womb, the stricken glint
illuminates thought of youth’s gold score
which held him up as on a splint
until time bore that nothing more
than dreams existed in the dint
of nothing, wielded like a whore.
Sometimes trickle
sometimes flood,
time rolls
in excess
of perdition,
determinant roar
let know
the bounty
still bounds
come rain
or flame.
Blood’s key–
ruby interlay of souls
huddling warm
against beating
hearts, pains,
gaining leverage
in hope,
gold lighted
dawn, somewhere
another’s eyes.
Lover, I
name thee–
human spirit–
your touch
as everything
between shadows,
drink, feast,
soothing ash
into soil,
emerald blooming
with remembrance.
* Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! I hope you’ve enjoyed my humble contribution to the season, and I wish you all the very best, whether an American celebrating the holiday like myself, or those of you outside the country just going about another day on the march toward a new year.
I fade in secret
Heart with the rain and the leaves—
Wilting spring flowers.
Harold Camping - the man who predicted the end of the world. And got it wrong. Again. Image care of Wikimedia Commons.
This week I have a bundle of quotes for you, as the previous week extolled in me a need for some reason up in here.
Rapture has come and passed according to those who believed it – other Christian groups actually had members outside gatherings of these people to comfort them in their realizations – and so I thought it a good time to address not only faith, but to leave you with a little commentary on society…
“He who has faith has… an inward reservoir of courage, hope, confidence, calmness, and assuring trust that all will come out well – even though to the world it may appear to come out most badly. “
~B.C. Forbes
“Faith must be enforced by reason…When faith becomes blind it dies.”
~Mahatma Gandhi
“Faith and doubt both are needed – not as antagonists, but working side by side to take us around the unknown curve. “
~Lillian Smith
“I think we risk becoming the best informed society that has ever died of ignorance.”
~Reuben Blades
Given the state of worry and relief my family’s been put through in the past couple weeks, I thought I would return to my regularly schedules Quotes of the Week with a few pieces on hope and family. There is great pain and immeasurable joy contained within the word – family – and they are, truly, among the most important relations we will ever have in life – for they are always with us, whether we always wish them to or not:
“The family. We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another’s desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together.”
~Erma Bombeck
“Sometimes our hearts get tangled
And our souls a little off-kilter
Friends and family can set us right
And help guide us back to the light.”
~Sera Christann
“Hope is that thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops…at all.”
~Emily Dickinson
Lovers dangle barefoot
brevity against the water’s kiss,
the ripples like wishes
in bottles, SOS and MIA
where snow dawns in itinerant icebergs
lain bare and broken on the shore.
His hands in her hair,
the wind knows not the blooming
of petals-in-flight
–it is a patient spring.
It’s a special One Shot, my friends and fellow poets.
Yesterday, One Stop Poetry won the Shorty Awards prize – Twitter’s equivalent of the Oscars – for art. It is an honor all of you helped us achieve, and one that legitimizes all we have done, and all we hope to do in the future. Be sure to send your warm regards and your congratulations to my fellow One Stop team members: Adam Dustus, Leslie Moon, Brian Miller, Pete Marshall, Claudia Schönfeld, Gay Cannon and Jessica Kristie, for all they have done. They’ll appreciate it, I assure you!
Art is important to all of us, and we hope to aid our fellow artists in the pursuit of their love. This is just another stepping stone in the realization of that dream. I can’t wait to see what the future holds for One Stop!
They say success
never tastes so sweet
without the sour hors d’oeuvre
of failure’s bounty;
were I but once
to taste the former
I might have some basis
to compare.
* My latest contribution to the wonderful One Shot Poetry Wednesdays! If you get the chance, be sure to check out all the other talented One Stop poets posting there – and what about yourself? If you haven’t signed up yet, and you’re among the creative…what are you waiting for?
It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day; spring is near at hand, and the mail is beginning to stir…
Image care of Photobucket.
Spring flowers in bloom
Hope rides letters on the wind—
Rejection season.
That’s right ladies and gents, the season of rejection letters is beginning. Just got another gem of one today. Personally, I like to store them up, in that oh-so-classy of ways, so I can look back on them with a smile if and when I actually do get published. Meanwhile: c’est la vie. What do you do with your rejection letters?
Nothing’s ever meant to be
Once it’s Gone.
Only when we dream
in white horses and technicolor dreamcoats
does the voice sound like Jesus
as he kisses down our backs–
it’s fire, hope, a cross reaching–
cracking, cracks
When it’s Gone.
We never think of horizons
beyond the storms.
The Waking Den 