Photo by Josh Applegate on Unsplash, for the Day 8 prompt, revisited. --- Sanctify my body as I pray; with clasped hands, bowed head, kneeling here, before this altar of remembering. I come for the broken bread, blessed, become shredded body. And wine in urn, become blood, spilt forty times but one. Sin seethes beneath the surface of this body, this flesh from earth descended, unravelling like a thread roughly yanked from frayed yarn. ...
Photo by Josh Applegate on Unsplash, for the Day 8 prompt. --- With bowed heads and clasped hands we come In quiet supplication, knees bowed, flesh unstrung- Hearts humbled, at the feet of the priest For bread broken. Blessed. Becoming crackling body And wine. Slipped into silver urn. Spilt blood. Divine liquid. Pange, lingua, gloriósi Córporis mystérium, Sanguinísque pretiósi,
My father looms Like a colossus in my mind His voice, tinged with righteous anger The lyric of my powerless youth But now in my season of adulthood, I see him as he is, A man who tried his very best But was human too.
For the ones the genes took. Photo by Wendy Scofield on Unsplash. We prayed the Jinns would not take you That when the dust from your fighting feet, and the chill of the terror of the night would lift you would return in peace. With our knees we ground a hole into the ground from constant supplication, in hope that you would be whole again but the genes would not let up ...
Image from Great Inspire, for the Day 5 prompt, only partially fulfilled. --- Come let us dance our discordant thoughts to calmness, joined by the rhythm of our joyful hearts, and a song welling up from deep within. Like a bird loosed from the tenuous grasp of gravity’s hold, let us float away. With the spring of defiant Freedom in our steps.
For the Day 4 Prompt, a challenge to describe an abstraction with concrete nouns. Photo by Steve Halama on Unsplash --- What it is is something smouldering A tiny reed, slowly taking flame That perchance with time might Burst into a raging flame What it is is a call and response A place remembered and returned to In a season of despair In its light one sees the self in all its glory warts and all, and learns the painful truth that one is human too
For the Day 3 prompt, A list poem of band names. I fear my choices betray my age (and my penchant for Christian Contemporary Music). Photo by frankie cordoba on Unsplash. --- Six Pence None The Richer for you corrodes my conformity into discordant notes. On Black Street s, six degrees north of Building 429 a Rush Of Fools Switches foot and stops to breathe again. DC Talks to the Newsboys Ignoring Caedmon’s Call Until the Third Day when the Second Chapter Of Acts is unleashed.
Offshore Nigeria, back in the day. For the prompt Rise/Set. --- It is now a mere three days to the start of National Poetry Month this year, three years since I last participated. Back then in addition to the prompts from the NaPoWriMo website, I had La Reine and Tolu for company, two poets who are far more deserving of the label. I plan on jumping in this year, the idea primarily being to participate, rather than hammer out high quality poetry. Fingers crossed.
Silence, Solitude and some beach-side scholasticism \\\* For the prompt, Silence.
– Aberdeen’s City Centre is a panoply of old, weathered buildings, seasoned – as Yusef Komunyakaa so eloquently puts it in his poem, Ode To The Drum – by wind, dusk and sunlight. To that trio of elements, one would have to add snow and rain, given they are hardly ever in short supply in this corner of the world. Before oil – and some would add, the EU – there was fishing and an entire industry of fish processing in and around the harbour area. These days, gleaming buildings - and car parks - share the skyline, a curious juxtaposition of old and new, brick and glass and perhaps the reinvention of a city.