Photo by Ruxandra Mateiu on Unsplash, for the Day 16 prompt. --- Where once we Wrapped ourselves in heavy Furs and coats We now skip Free, drawn by the warmth of the Reborn sun. The scent of Daffodils, chirp of spring birds Unfurls joy Spring has sprung And like children, giddy with Joy, we play.
– Cry for the riven country. For the ones for whom doom descended from the skies in Douma, spreading death in the wake of its yellow green tendrils. Cry for the dead and the dying. For the ones culled from the living, whose blood, like a libation rejected pools at the altar of the sixth fleet. The whine of drones, swish of tomahawks and boom of hellfires pounding earth into tired dust assail their ears, lighting up the night sky. ...
A Haibun, for the Day Twelve prompt. --- The greyness subsumes everything, water filled skies allied to grey granite blocks defining the sky line. Sometimes, a mist will drift in from the sea, shrouding the city in a gloomy pall. The winds howl incessantly, its fingers reaching through every gap and every crack spreading chill and forcing a quickening of the footstep of all who brave the elements. The defining characteristic though is one of just getting on with it. Sometimes - for two days of summer as we say - the sun comes out. ...
Image source: Huffington Post. For the Day 11 prompt. --- Time tinges the Future with death and demise Certain end. Each day is A war won by birthing the Self anew. The claws of Time etch themselves in our skin Separating Desire from Response,bending will to reality. The world ends Not with a bang but with a Whimper*. – \* T.S Elliot, The Hollow Men.
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