Poetry

For the Sunday Muse prompt #235: ** Breath by breath, bead by bead, the prayers of this parched heart rise. Lips quivering with the yearning of a thirsty heart, pursed to take the blood and flesh, blessed, transubstantiated. Kneaded by hands washed seven times- stripped of yeast and the things that beguile- we come to take the bread in hope to shed our turpitude, arise anew. In the ritual of rest and reset, we speak our words into the world, lingering in the liminal space between asking and accepting

For The Sunday Muse Prompt #234. Image source: Rosie Ann Prosser.: ** Still, in the silent solitude of repose, I survey the face that peers back at me. Three candles flickering in the dark, a space suffused by a mellow, yellow light pushing back against the dark. The ghosts of grief, railing against delight fight the light, their dissonant sounds a constant clang. But in light, there is delight to know this is to rest, here.

For the Day Four prompt, well, kind of. Photo by Abeer Zaki on Unsplash ** it lingers on the edge of my tongue, its heft hanging heavy, marinating in its moistness, each letter, alive, each syllable yielding to the next, then fading like the morning mists wisps, resplendent, gracing the verdant green but then losing themselves to the rising heat. I count to three and then exhale, each breath a gift from earth, now returned.

A prose poem for the NaPoWriMo Day One prompt, Photo by Jared Rice on Unsplash ** Sometimes a breath is not just a breath, not just the rising and the falling of the chest, the slow release of the tension of fretting and of wondering, and of wandering. Sometimes a breath is not just the lungs taking and giving, extending life. Sometimes a breath is the sound of battle, the spoils of the war for tomorrow, won moment by moment, because forever is too short and tomorrow is not promised and this moment, fleeting and vanishing is all that is for sure.

For The Sunday Muse Prompt #188 and the 49 from Northcote to White City: ** On the 49 from Northcote, a young woman sits. She folds her hands, hangs her feet, and lets the world without slip by - grey granite yielding to gleaming glass, verdant green disappearing behind the whorls of potted plants. Somewhere outside, the river wends its way across the plain. Above, in a fleeting moment a giant clanging bird roars. Somewhere on the corner of Shepherd’s Bush and King’s an old man, wraps his hands around himself as his breath draws wisps in the winter wind. As it was in the beginning and now is the river remains. We all like small lights flicker, and then are gone.

For The Sunday Muse Prompt #186: ** Before you call me by this name and shrink the sum of all my days down to this facade, this still-life of sepia pixels flickering like daylight disappearing before the force of dusk; Before you place the burdens of history around my neck, till it begins to break beneath the weight of expectation, you must know that this name is one of a myriad, each bequeathed by the ones who came before, a prayer that we might see, the small lights in our being.

For The Sunday Muse prompt #180: ** We come to water to be washed and be reborn, this hand cupping the curvature of the face, the other dipped, drenched in the very fluid from which we come, the space between the fingers of that hand filled with the water, straining against the strictures of the hand. We come to water to lose ourselves in the beauty of the simple things, to see the dirt of our days and the detritus of the night loosen, dissolving until we see ourselves pristine whole again, the way we have imagined in our dreams a lip, an eye, lingering still in the mirror of still water.

For The Sunday Muse Prompt #179: ** The scent of life and of living hangs heavy on this place, Here, where the weight of memory and first things lose themselves in the labyrinth of the mind. First step, first walk, first smile. First words - garbled beyond recognition but finding the connection between the proffered body and sustenance. First leaving, first returning then leaving - the first steps of a lonesome journey to a far country, of seeking the wily welcome of the open world calling - siren-like - from beyond the walls that time has built. ...

For The Sunday Muse #178: ** In the wisps of the smoke blown in a moment of recalcitrance the man he might yet be lurks. The man he now is and the one he once was yielding in the moment to the future better one. Becoming.

For The Sunday Muse Prompt #176: ** When in the stillness of the night, sleep slips away, slowly - my eyes heavy with the weariness of deferred respite - I remember the road from there to here, how it turns upon itself, snaking this way and then that and then disappears. I remember that leaving is for the living - those who have learned to gift the blessing of forgiving and forgetting to the past.