The-Sunday-Whirl

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 #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 #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.

“Guardian” by Chie Yoshii, for The Sunday Muse #37 and The Sunday Whirl Wordle 385 prompts: \\\* She perches on your shoulder This invisible guardian of the night Her voice a quiet word Whispered in your ear Barely heard above the din The way text, lightly etched On a slab of stone would look In the shimmer of dusk. A dream deferred cannot slip back Into a sleepless mind. Once a butterfly’s eyes Have seen the light of freedom; Once its kicks have set it free From the caul of the caterpillar It cannot become a larva again. ...

Wordle 382: \\\* We brave the howl ing wind, wincing on the odd occasion when its icy fingers somehow reach within the folds of our coats to touch our necks. Along the snow covered streets, the children play, their shrieks of joy as they spin again and again piercing the air a hundred hundred times until they drop with exhaustion. From the coffee shop around the corner, different caramel drizzled drinks bring back their strength. This is the plan, to - with any luck - keep them so occupied that all they can do on the train home is sleep, so we get some peace and quiet.

For Wordle 381: --- Last night they gathered with intent, forty-eight memo s a lingering stench that could no longer be shrug ged away. Behind the bluster of “doing the right thing” was the lure of the key s to Number 10. When the frame is badly broken can the picture be restored? Is the crime of lying word s so great that everything is irretrievably broken and no longer of use? Inside, the Wounded lived to fight another day; outside the circling hyenas beaten back for a season will return.

For Wordle 380: --- This entity - bare arms rippling with intent- pulls victory out of thin air. Time and time again, the potential for losing one’s head in a flurry of jabs is overcome by the evidence of winning, the one thing missing in this me being a fear that flinches before the rolling fists land. This is how it ends- victory snatched from the claws of loss when we decide.