Poetry

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash. For NaPoWriMo Day 1. \\\* Fold your hands in quiet contemplation, eyelids shut, pressed tightly together, a wall standing tall between the harsh light outside and the quiet darkness within. Breathe, inhale the scent of home, bread and wine, blended into the memories of your youth, when Faith, child-like, bubbled free. You who have wandered seven hills and seven rivers into a far country, drawn by the lure of freedom but now have had your eyes awakened seek redemption. This is what prayer is, quietly heeding the call of the divine

Photo by Skitterphoto from Pexels, for The Sunday Muse Prompt #48. \\\* Maybe it was the slant of the light streaming in, slicing through, as it were, the haze of yester-year’s detritus; the half-drawn blind like a mind stretched thin between leaving and returning, a face half-turned towards the memory of lost songs hovering just beyond the reach of a quivering tongue, and this present brooding. Maybe this is what the burden of life is. To carry, buried deep within one’s heart, the remains of the songs of one’s youth; until in a season of re-memory, they all come back.

Image Source, For The Sunday Muse Prompt #46. \\\* Petal by petal, life returns to this frigid vista each one a delicate splash of colour against a canvas, bringing life, the way blood revivifies a face just in from the cold. From things once dead, life springs again, reborn.

For Prompt #45 at The Sunday Muse. Image “Be Free” by Magic Love Crow. \\\* Line by line the silhouette of an angel rises up, phoenix-like, in the space where the prophet’s finger parts the sand. This is what freedom is- the delirious joy of walking away from the baying crowd, the space between the lines as alive as the lines.

For The Sunday Muse Prompt #44 and some words from The Sunday Whirl Wordle #392. Image “Ireland” by Emily Soto, fashion photographer \\\* Maybe it was the scent of roses- freshly cut, wafting in on the evening breeze that stole my attention; the jolt intruding the same way the reverb of a gentle tap interrupts a deep reverie, a dream receding as though it were a distant vista seen through the lens of a collapsing wormhole. Where cold, hard, and grey once reigned, a wreath of red leaves begins to spring, its colours a bright tide more alive now than it ever was.

For The Sunday Muse prompt #43. Image Source. \\\* Child of Mother Earth, dust, breath, fire, and water, from clay formed, stitched together by the finger of the Divine. You, who are a string stretched taut between the past and the future unbroken in the present, have simmered beneath the pressure of hell and high water, bearing the burden of a message preserved for you. But now like a bird set free, you must take wing and fly. I call you by your name, Alafiaoluwa, Be peace.

Image: “War Horse and Peace Horse” by Sue Halstenberg. For The Sunday Muse #42. \\\* You and I like two fiery stars locked in the embrace of an eternal dance are becoming as one, our light growing in Coherence brighter now than it once was. Against the odds war and peace are finding common ground, making all the broken whole again.

For The Sunday Muse prompt #41 and The Sunday Whirl Wordle 388. Image Source. \\\* Green with a hint of yellow, the tender tendril pushes past the strictures of an empty bottle. Outside, the chill from snow piled high smothers everything, its weight like a bland, white blanket inhibit ing life. The shy and the retiring do not inherit the delights of this benighted world, only the tough who blithely swipe away civility appear to win the trial of perception. ...

For The Sunday Muse prompt #40 and The Sunday Whirl Wordle 388. In The Middle of Freedom, Image Source. \\\* My fingers mould the pliant clay beneath the surface of this puddle into an image of a memory; each mound of earth rubbed round between my fingers a portion of a story emerging like birds set free from a gilded cage. The memory is a chain anchoring the fluid present to the stable past. It pulses like a thing that lives - somehow more alive with freedom than at first it would seem.

For The Sunday Muse #39 and Wordle 387 from The Sunday Whirl. Image Source. \\\* Here in the shadow Of despair, loneliness Hangs in the air like A wet coat, the silence Like the weight of pebbles Beneath which which one sags, Broken at the knees. Each step towards The distant light is a prayer Of repenting, for forgetting What love in the wild Feels like. Step by step, walk after walk We are making this world Whole again, heeding the Inner call to become Wild and free again.