Poetry

Photo by Thiago Matos from Pexels. For the Sunday Muse prompt #67 \\\* Even broken things can sometimes find a use: jagged edges catching light, a half-face teasing memory, and imagination. Life, reinvented.

For The Wednesday Muse Prompt, Summer Rain. \\\* It hangs in the air like a shroud, this heavy, brooding cloud of dust through which the sun tries to force its way; the same way a frail old man, bent double at the waist, tries to hack his way through dense undergrowth, by dint of will power and persistence. Suddenly, like a giant oak falling, squashing dense foliage with its weight, the heavens are torn by rain, and relief. Peals of thunder, flashes of lightning birth many miracles of tiny rivers suddenly sprung, washing away the dust of earth baked dry, after which comes the smell of new, clean things, of rebirth and things made whole again.

One Day I’ll Fly Away. Photo by Hayley Roberts. For The Sunday Muse Prompt #66. \\\* Waiting here before this wall of burnt brick reaching high above my head freedom seems distant a mirage shimmering in the distance; promised. Hope deferred makes sick the longing heart, but in this sliver of breaking light, the echo of the promise rings, one day I’ll spread my wings and fly away.

For The Sunday Muse prompt #63. Image: the butterfly jar by lostinthisphotograph \\\* The beauty of these golden wings wrestled free, breath by breath, from the confines of a cocoon, finds itself entombed again, the memory of its flitting flight a distant echo now far removed from the frozen present, a life stilled.

For The Sunday Muse Prompt, #61. Photo Artistry by Erik Johansson Master Photo-manipulation Artist. \\\* Slat by slat, dab by dab this dream in grey is being remade into a sea of blue, its quiescent skin stretched tight like a canvas between the present and the past where the sky meets the earth’s lie. Each slat was once alive, each cell once bursting with the pressure of rich water, drawn by breathing; air and sunlight entwined in a dance whose beat is borne in the body, from seed to fruit to seed by rebirthing. Now this dream of grey, frozen still, is reawakening each dab of colour returning life to where it once was.

For The Sunday Muse, Prompt #60. In which I wonder what the reality of what a cat feels is. \\\* What if what we are Are mere playthings, pawns roughly hewn from stunted dogwood, clinging to life in a season of dearth. What if the feeling of contentment is a mirage, a vision of delusion far removed from the way things really are. What if what we think is the beauty of a garland really is a chain binding us to a different reality, what if.

For The Sunday Muse prompt #59, Photography by Carlo Pautasso. \\\* Plucked by its roots from a place where it once was whole, it lies now alone, the brightness of its petals a splash of hope stark against the blandness of everything. The shadow of an impending end stretches from the future into this space between The Living and the bleeding out of life but till it comes, life lingers still.

Freedom, for The Sunday Muse Prompt #56. \\\* It hovers in the distance in the space where the edge of consciousness meets the taste of remembering. Where air meets skin, and the sound of living is squeezed into a high pitched wail and then regains length, and afterwards dies as they recede into the distance. Each bump on the road, is like a firm word tossed into the wind, each jar as like a current shared between melded parts. From the distance joy, delirious in its appearance calls but here in the lull before the storm lies a fleeting pleasure, a moment of peace before the whirlwinds return

For The Sunday Wednesday Muse Prompt, Garden Spot. Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash. A nod to the still vivid memories I have of being dragged off to our family farm by my parents in those dire, dark SAP days. ** First comes the rain, and then the wakened worms which turn the hard, sun-baked soil into compliant mulch. Grain by grain, leaf by leaf the beauty of Symbiosis begins to rear its head, the cycle of death begetting life and sustenance for the things we must ingest, for which with backs bent beneath the blazing sun we labour; the reward of another day survived eked out from the hard, earth.

For The Sunday Muse prompt, Night Sky \\\* The starlight sprinkled like tiny slivers of silver splashed against a dark canvas peels back the curtain on a tumultuous past- birth, death, dust clouds swirling, mists of primordial molecules accreting, then Becoming - a message to the future from the past echoing down the aeons like a strummed string. I was here before you were; before your father was, and his father’s father too Now you see me as I was. Ponder.