Wildlings

For The Sunday Muse Prompt #82. \\\* Though quiet in their noon day repose, strength hides within their supple limbs, the power of the one - unfettered in its reach - melded to the quiet guile of the other; together - a Whole stronger than its parts - freely, wildly going.

November 19, 2019 · 1 min · AJ

Dancing In The Dark

For The Sunday Muse Prompt #81 . Photography by Sarolta Ban (Website HERE ) \\\* The lure of the lyre - alive in its reverb - calls out, inviting beauty and the beast to dance, to yield to the rhythm of the wind, as it rustles in the leaves, swaying the trees. We all - boar and deer- of earth born and saved, gather here, to dance the gentle dance of the dark.

November 13, 2019 · 1 min · AJ

Missing Parts

For the Sunday Muse prompt #80 and Wordle 428. Image source. \\\* I carry a heavy silence in my missing parts, each breath a prayer for resolve to fight the desire to resign myself to the ache of a festering disgust spawned by the echoes of a lie borne up on the winds from the hills into the valley’s depths. Outside a crisis looms - our house of cards built up brick by brick with the things we want to believe slowly yields to the probing of the truth, until in the way things really are I find myself covered, whole again.

November 6, 2019 · 1 min · AJ

Together...

For The Sunday Muse prompt #79 and Wordle 472 \\\* Sometimes beautiful things can dance in the light - the dainty and the dense chiming together, their hum heavy with intent as it probes the edge between the steady and the sublime. In washing the raw hide of of a dead gazelle with salt there is a saving from its struggle with putrefaction, a prayer for forgiveness, for absolution for the crime of taking by brute force. Here on the edge of the things we think we know the dainty and the dense become as one, both reduced to subsisting at the mercy of the things which hold everything together.

October 31, 2019 · 1 min · AJ

Yellow Dream

For The Sunday Muse Prompt #75. Image Source . \\\* A yellow orb,tethered to the earth by slender strings descends, its yellow light a hue cast over this dream in which I find myself looking at my selves; the past and the future holding the hands of the present, tiny figures scurrying up ladders which seem to reach for the sky, reinventing what is seen. Darkness lingers in the corners of this vista but stroke by stroke pixel by pixel, the dream and reality are slowly melding into one.

October 1, 2019 · 1 min · AJ

Remembering

Image source, for The Sunday Muse prompt #74 \\\* Like the slowly louder clunks a train’s wheels send ahead, as it wends its way along ancient tracks, the old man’s memories float slowly to the fore, the streaks of dappled light dancing on the walls behind his face a spotlight, falling on him the same way it falls on a minstrel at a cabaret, drawing a hush out of the muted mumblings of the gathered. Though his wrinkled skin, once soft now lies wrinkled, warped and folded and his fingers once supple now lack dexterity, like a seagull resplendent in its freedom the memories of past songs return, the track and the piano fusing in a crescendo refusing to be silenced.

September 25, 2019 · 1 min · AJ

Free

Photography by Svetlana Belyaeva click HERE for website. For the Sunday Muse Prompt #71 \\\* Where fear once threaded its tiny tendrils through our feet, and captive hearts We choose to fly free leaving behind the safety of this confined space. Because though freedom only is a promise, it trumps certain defeat.

September 3, 2019 · 1 min · AJ

Gift

Gift, for The Sunday Muse prompt #68. Photography by Edouard Boubat. \\\* Against the pressure of the sea and the darkness of the depths, the gift has been formed, layer by layer each crystal a prayer offered up for protection from the predation of the boring sponge, the oyster worm and the scurrying crab. Each day that water has washed over it - wearing tiny paths across its stubborn skin - a battle has been won; of survival, and quiet reassurance. And when someday, bequeathed by the sea, it lies in the hands of a grateful child, its hardy brilliance will yet still speak, more loudly in its silence than all the things it has survived.

August 12, 2019 · 1 min · AJ

Broken Things

Photo by Thiago Matos from Pexels. For the Sunday Muse prompt #67 \\\* Even broken things can sometimes find a use: jagged edges catching light, a half-face teasing memory, and imagination. Life, reinvented.

August 8, 2019 · 1 min · AJ

Harmattan Rain

For The Wednesday Muse Prompt, Summer Rain. \\\* It hangs in the air like a shroud, this heavy, brooding cloud of dust through which the sun tries to force its way; the same way a frail old man, bent double at the waist, tries to hack his way through dense undergrowth, by dint of will power and persistence. Suddenly, like a giant oak falling, squashing dense foliage with its weight, the heavens are torn by rain, and relief. Peals of thunder, flashes of lightning birth many miracles of tiny rivers suddenly sprung, washing away the dust of earth baked dry, after which comes the smell of new, clean things, of rebirth and things made whole again.

August 2, 2019 · 1 min · AJ