For The Sunday Muse Prompt #110, \\\* The heart ponders what lies beyond the realm of sight, what hides in the place where dreams come from, where the beauty of a still night twinkles in the soft light. From afar it tugs at the strings of the curious heart, in its distance, a promise of salvation from the fires below.
\\\* Seemingly like in the blink of an eye – like play like play in the pidgin English of my youth – we are somehow at the end of May! Summer is finally here, bringing in its wake the realisation that if I had stayed up North, the first of my Nine Fridays of Summer would have just gone past. As it is though, I find myself in an intermission of sorts, loitering in the space between a past life and the future in which an adventure in the sun hovers just out of reach, 70 days late. There are of course worse things than swapping grey granite for verdant green or being cooped up with family, like dying or very nearly dying like so many people, including a few closer to home for me, have over the past few months of this pandemic. ...
For The Sunday Muse Prompt #109, Image “Snow White & Rose Red” by Kerry Darlington \\\* The kind hearts of the shy and the cheerful make space for the stranger, a traveller quivering in the winter wind, lost, for a moment. What lies hidden in the dream is that sometimes a good deed travels the world for a season and then returns twice revived, the shy and the cheerful ones saved in return by the stranger who once wandered by.
For The Sunday Muse prompt #108: \\\* Bound up in its faux pillars and its dangling chandeliers are the memories of stolen things, the tears shed here by the lost ones reverberating in our ears. Time disappears here, subsumed by the delight of truly feeling and of seeing, the art of each act a tribute to the ones who’ve come before.
Of the many conversations I have had over the past few years, one sticks out in my mind, not for its length or its importance but for how odd it felt at the time. As I recall it, a travelling salesman and I had just finished a meeting and were heading to the kitchenette at work to drop our coffee mugs off when he asked: “How did you end up here?”. ...
With NaPoWriMo done and dusted for this year, I’m getting the chance to catch up on other stuff. The fifth (and penultimate) assignment for the Creative Non-Fiction Course I started in February was to describe a city and the feelings it engendered in us during our last visit. Here goes: \\\* In my more nostalgic moments, I call her the City of Red Earth, but that is as far away as possible from what I feel as I drag my bags towards the check-in desk ahead of heading back out there. The last time, H had just passed, and the three weeks which followed were consumed by the busyness of dealing with the dead. Everyone I tell about this upcoming trip shares cautionary tales; of the power industry grinding to a halt, the spiralling crime rates, and the rapidly disintegrating roads. Not to seem too dismissive, I smile and nod at their concerns whilst inwardly telling myself I’ll do a good job of passing; after all my pidgin English – lightly accented as it is – is passable. ...
Last day, Yay!!! The prompt for today as this season of NaPoWriMo comes to an end is to write a poem about something that returns. Photo by Zane Lee on Unsplash \\\* The songs the birds bring each spring remind us of the stirring of life, darkness yielding to the lengthening light and cherry blossoms blooming again. Hope is the thing that birds bring that after death comes life, and rebirth.
Off prompt today: \\\* After the rising and the falling of the things that surround, after the letting off of blood for forgiveness, after the release of the pressure building up, Breathe
Today’s prompt asks us to describe a bedroom from our past, inspired by Martha Dickinson Bianchi’s description of her aunt’s (Emily Dickinson) cozy room. My room in the house on 39th street came to mind. \\\* Long days longer nights rubber balls bounced off walls till smudged, comics snuck under the covers, childhood fantasies of meeting George and the other four of being Super Man and Captain America. Behind all the smell of things lived in. These are the things we can never forget.
For Day 27, the prompt is to write a poem in the form of a review of something not normally reviewed such as a mother-in-law, the moon, or the year 2020…I went for me, the prodigal in need of forgiveness :) \\\* Offends seventy times seven times but returns for forgiveness. Me