For Cee’s FOTD
Memory Games
Though memories are sketchy, those that remain are vivid—
mere scraps of joy or humor or times when she was livid.
No way to tell what snips of time her memory will nourish—
current relations lost to time while past ones live and flourish.
The mind does nasty tricks when it decides to misbehave.
It may leave us abandoned within its darkening cave,
or perhaps it casts a cinema only one can see,
drawing them into a world of dreams where they are free.
No one who walks through memory’s door can return to tell
whether it is heaven or a living hell.
Another trick of life that draws us fast within it,
forcing us to play the game without a way to win it.
Prompt words for today are jive, sketchy, relations and vivid.
Lost World
There is no skin for our ceiling.
No skin.
The moon, like an animal,
hovers over and around our houses.
In their caves, twitching iguanas live their small deaths
while, caught by moonlight, my friends go sleepless.
I follow my heart in circles, mutter protests to the stars,
running first against, then with
the incredible crocodile.
There is no skin–not any–for the ordinary world.
The dead in their graves are still for a very long time.
Then they rise to pass again around the circle.
The children are easily sleeping.
Tomorrow they will question the old women
with the candor that is necessary
to rub the callouses from their souls.
Straining to the song of life which calls,
“Awaken. Awaken,”
the mouths of the rising dead eat the steaming earth
and under them, in the earth,
are layers of the innocent
with the hearts of dead flowers
because they have neither the fragrance of life,
nor the beat of it.
When they were alive, they
spilled coins from their purses
and from their mouths, spilled prayers for their recent sins.
All of them balanced the two sides of sadness–
the sadness of seeing, and the sadness of not seeing.
At the time of death, all wash themselves clean of their friends.
And God, the rider through life––
through all things holy as well as all things evil––
hovers near the ceiling
while the refugees shake their brothers,
like water, from their hair.
This God,
who in life took passage in an ordinary boat,
who left his resurrection like a butterfly disappearing,
now travels with light,
words like new flowers on his tongue,
Whispering, “Now. Wake up.”
A sentry walks the escarpment of the reservoir–
an angel who grew up in the trench of the soldier
and the boat of the apostle––
an angel with the teeth of a serpent
who sings all night,
his beautiful face lifted to the violent sky.
“Where are the hands of my mother?”
There is no skin for his ceiling.
No skin. No skin.
The aqua sky?
Gone, my friends,
replaced by fire.
No skin left for our world.
We are caught in a too-long day
that fades into inevitable night.
We lie awake,
our minds throbbing to music
from the drum of the moon
that leads us into dreams
where we forget the large lie
and remember, finally, that
the sins of the heart
are not just
theater.
Torch of Liberty
If we could kidnap inequality and lock it safe away,
then resurrect our scruples and let them have their say,
we could acquit our consciences and set our nation right.
Then reilluminate her torch to guide us through the night.
Prompt words today are acquit, scruples, kidnap, inequality Photo by Juan Mayobre on Unsplash Used with Permission.
When my husband and I did arts and crafts shows, at least once during every show, someone would wander into our booth, have a good look around, and as they left, shrug their shoulders and say, “Well it’s different!” (Usually pronounced “differnt.”) It actually was an in joke between those displaying their art—always interpreted as the speaker not understanding and not really liking the arts and crafts. Growing up in a small town, it was not the first time I’d heard the word in its derogatory sense. Thus, this poem:
“Different”
When I finally made my way into the world so wide
I found myself exotic. Somehow transmogrified.
I liked being the foreigner, eminent in my oddity.
I found that being different was a definite commodity.
It was my prerogative to be just who I was
without creating currents in the small town buzz
of that place I had grown up in. My acts were less explosive.
My strange words now acceptable, not garnered as corrosive.
They thought my strange behavior typical of my nation—
those oddities of word choice and excesses of oration.
So in being totally different, somehow I felt more the same.
In finally being somewhere where different was not a sin,
the more different I was, the more that I fit in!!!
Prompt words today are explosive, prerogative, foreigner, eminent and wide.
I promise. This is the last of this little orchid that I seem to be fascinated by! It’s now far away in Mexico and I’m in Arizona, so you’ll have a small vacation from it. Let’s see what desert beauties we can come up with!
For Cee’s FOTD challenge.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 