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.
Photo by Max van den Oetelaar on Unsplash ** It feels somewhat trite, given what is afoot in the world, to be riled up about life in my gilded prison corner of the world. The Ukraine and Russia conflict looms large of course, but for all the outpouring of support - and some might say posturing - it feels more like a cause célèbre, than anything else. As others have pointed out thousands more have lost their lives in Yemen,. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars were hardly less gruesome for ordinary civilians. Closer home, it seems like Nigeria teeters more on the edge of imploding, with power, security and the general hardship levels all running away in the wrong direction. Of course, concurrent occurrences of bad things does not make any of them less ‘bad’. One can only hope that the energies expended in mobilizing and blanketing the air waves with the plight of Ukrainians is also extended to other (blacker and browner) bodies. ...