For The Sunday Muse Prompt #234. Image source: Rosie Ann Prosser.: ** Still, in the silent solitude of repose, I survey the face that peers back at me. Three candles flickering in the dark, a space suffused by a mellow, yellow light pushing back against the dark. The ghosts of grief, railing against delight fight the light, their dissonant sounds a constant clang. But in light, there is delight to know this is to rest, here.
For The Sunday Muse prompt #180: ** We come to water to be washed and be reborn, this hand cupping the curvature of the face, the other dipped, drenched in the very fluid from which we come, the space between the fingers of that hand filled with the water, straining against the strictures of the hand. We come to water to lose ourselves in the beauty of the simple things, to see the dirt of our days and the detritus of the night loosen, dissolving until we see ourselves pristine whole again, the way we have imagined in our dreams a lip, an eye, lingering still in the mirror of still water.
“Roots” 1943 by Frida Kahlo, for the Sunday Muse prompt 171: ** They say that fiery flames beget cold ash, the certainty of beliefs passed down petering out into the lukewarm ambivalence of doubt and questioning. These roots are the things that hold us still each tendril like a link tethering us to the ones who went before.
For H, and The Sunday Muse prompt #170: ** She lingers like a ghost in the night, this memory of my mother, framed by a distant light: the stately stillness of her furrowed brow, the slight tilt of her chin catching the light, defiant. The moment when the lone tear hangs - perched impossibly as though straining against the world - comes to me again and again in a vision of the night, its lingering like a thread tethering me in my seasons of incertitude.
Photo by Hermes Rivera on Unsplash. For The Poetic Asides prompt #554 ** Sometimes I think that my sight is leaving me, the common, quotidian comfort of seeing the world that touches me slowly slipping away, taking flight but not yet gone; only a little less close the next time morning rolls my way. Maybe it is my mind forgetting where the thin discs of shimmering glass that bring the light end, and where my rods and cones ...
For The Sunday Muse prompt #141: ** Each whirl of the earth around the Sun’s well of power and of light brings us back here. Like a boat dragged inexorably by the rising tide to shore, the swell of the sea brings us peace, to a season of reflecting, of contemplating and of pause. Time’s rhythm like the faint echo of a distant drumbeat is welcome whisper in our ear. Yesterday ...
Photo by Hannah Olinger on Unsplash. For Day 14 of the November Poem-A-Day Challenge ** Her voice is an echo from afar, the song one that I remember her singing over me. Sleep - child sleep, London bridge is falling down, black sheep have no wool for you. The world has snatched her presence but the memories etched in the linings of my mind linger and remain.
Photo by Olesia Misty on Unsplash. For Day 13 of the November Poem-A-Day Challenge ** You have carried yourself into a far country untethering yourself from the strings of domesticity and caring and the hold of warm soup bubbling over the warm embers of Mother’s hearth. You have dragged your portion of our things over the misty mountains into a strange place where the voice of the Matriarch is obscured by the cooing of the birds and the singing of the sirens. ...
Photo by Douglas Bagg on Unsplash. For Day 7 of the November Poem-A-Day Challenge. ** may the ones that death took this time not have been lost in vain. may the scars etched into our bodies, our minds and our skins by the daily pressure of oppression be a reminder of what was but no longer is, because this time we pressed through against the odds and found light for the future ones.
Photo by Danielle MacInnes on Unsplash. For Day 4 of the November Poem-A-Day Challenge. ** Learn which voices to let escape the guards around your ears. Accept the things which return, their hold unyielding. Breathe, because the things the heart beats for are the things which leave it raw.