With time one learns there are no real endings, only times, and new seasons… --- NaPoWriMo is a wrap for this year, even though I never did get round to completing the Day 14 challenge. Big ups to La Reine and Tolu who challenged and inspired along the way… Bring on 2016!
[ Source] Four stars for the Chelsea boots in brown; five from Wood, for their soft leather and inner cushion, for how easy they fit his wide feet and how they arrive in time for spring and the promise of new beginnings. One star from Miles, for how they fall apart; split at the heel after seven months of use; for how they’ll harm your feet, and fall apart as though sawn in two. ...
In the unknown you clutch vestigial memories of night journeys and of trains and being surprised by grey granite segueing into lush greenery but once you cross the Bridge across the Firth of Forth Hope awakens ‘Cos you’re Home. On train journeys, coming home and the Forth Road Bridge for the prompt for Day 28 at NaPoWriMo, a truly gorgeous sight on a (rare?) sunny November day as I found many years ago…
Pause, On the corner of Kings’ and 23rd North West and smile, let your face crumble like a cookie dipped in spring milk. Tell her the musky scent of her perfume reminds you of spring wafting in on the wind heady, yet subtle, hardly felt. Moan about the weather, of snow pelting down like hail of sunshine shoved into a corner by clouds and then nightfall When you find she’s clutching Chaucer to her chest and McEwan in her bag, read her a line from Komunyakaa: ‘I took seven roads to get here and almost died three times’*. ...
For Mag 267 You and I are sweeping up the shards of something blithely broken, something shattered into a thousand jagged things, by this weight, this unshifting burden of this we, we nearly were. There is leaving, and then this, Leaving, headed west, chasing closure, across the valley, beyond which there is no returning.
[ Source] You feel the fever the morning after the strangers leave, engorged by their suckling of your life sap. The gift they leave is the delirium. Dry skin, heavy head and the shivers; the sense of warped time and a bubble of discomfort They rob the future of the joy of present presence- one dies every minute but for those who escape there is only the burning burden of relief. For World Malaria Day… And the one child every minute stolen from our future by the disease.
Shall I compare you to a harmattan day? You are far more refreshing, than palm wine. Strong winds do bear the Sahara’s clay But in your shade, is rest divine. For the NaPoWriMo Day 24 prompt - to write a parody of a famous poem; in this case Shakespeare’s sonnet number 18. Catching up..
[ Source] --- Rabbits nonchalantly nibbling at grass, whiff of daffodil scent, beer-bellied men, bare chested; women, pale armed seeking sun. Spring’s sprung and like moths to flame we bask in its warmth. --- For the Day 22 prompt at NaPoWriMo; and Earth Day.
For Prompt #21 at NaPoWriMo - Erasure, and an inexplicably unsettling Ted Talk by the International Justice Mission’s Gary Haugen, even though this probably doesn’t count as an erasure poem. – I’m not much of a crier- In Rwanda tears just aren’t much help Compassion - cum passio - mean(s) to suffer with Up close to human suffering. Your first introduction Might have been We Are The World. A mom from Zambia, three kids, Widow, coals on the cooking fire Completely cold, watch Peter suffer, grow cold. ...
A bloke can do no worse Than believe his own hype Unless it is to hope That a grand Messianic gesture Might turn the ebbing tide of Love, Where a simple one would do. For everything there is a time And a season for everything under the Sun But what virtue does Hope have unless She stir in dire times?