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.
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.
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.
For The Sunday Muse prompt #78. Image copyright Erik Johansson. \\\* Stroke by stroke these words, hewn by force, as though from resistant rock are building a shelter, each one a link to a thought and then a world beating back the clouds which loom, a slowly growing splash of colour holding out against the ashen night without. These words are calling the trees, to stand in defiance against the howling wind and the ground, now covered with frost, to cling to life, through the night, because tomorrow comes, and with beginning again.
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.
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.
For the Sunday Muse prompt #73. \\\** Beneath the garb of Prudence and propriety deep delight can lurk.
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.
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.
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.