Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: Pink and Yellow (separately or combined)
This is a post from a few years ago, when it was still possible to travel to a place where there is a notable change of seasons. In my part of Mexico, the changes are not so observable. The hills get lush green in the rainy season and after 6 months or so, get a bit beiger each month until June, when the rain starts and they green up again. Things bloom year round, so otherwise, it’s hard to tell what season it is. For the past 19 years, my years have been broken into rainy season and non-rainy season. Keeps it simple.
For the Sunday Writing Prompt: Change of Season
Foxes Under Moonlight
The phantasms rise in tandem as they seep out of their boxes
to caress the bats and tantalize the foxes
by swooping through their caves and pulling at their tails.
Of all the foxes’ problems, they cause the most travails.
On Halloween they haunt the world, including you and me,
but in the interim, they aren’t allowed to wander free.
They’re restricted to the meadows, the byways and those places
where they are not likely to encounter human faces.
Phantasms are not cordial. They harry and they tease.
They seep into the smallest crack and travel on the breeze.
They stir up other spirits and agitate the fleas,
causing havoc everywhere and doing what they please.
So though they might harass your world every Halloween,
and though they might be spine-tingling and horrible and mean,
it is the one night of the year they leave the foxes be,
so the foxes are beholding to the likes of you and me.
If you should dare to wander through the forest and the trees
on this All-Saints evening, get down on your knees
and peer into the burrow of the soundly sleeping foxes
curled up in a ball with their noses near their soxes.
See them sleeping soundly, undisturbed within their dreams—
twitching in contentment under the moon’s full beams?
Your one night of terror is the fox’s only break.
Be grateful for your haunting, if just for the foxes’ sake!
Word prompts today are interim, cordial, phantasm, tandem, outside the box and dusk. Ghosts may take it easier on foxes on Prince Edward Island, as is evidenced by this fox that I observed spending a good half hour or so basking in the sun of the yard of my friends Dianne and Andy. Or perhaps it was the sunlight that drove the phantasms away. Or our presence.
Dem Bones
The skeletons are all tucked in, safely in their beds
with naughty vitriolic dreams swirling through their heads.
Their atrocious behavior saved for another day,
they will not raise a ruckus. They’re holding it at bay.
They’re resting up for Halloween which is the night that they
will throw aside their covers and come out to play!
Prompt words today are ruckus, vitriol, atrocious, play and skeleton.
(photopainting by jdb)
Amused
When she enters, I’m in her thrall,
and I have no control at all.
Sometimes she carries a riding crop
and drives me on so I can’t stop.
She rides in smoothly from my dreams
inspiring reams and reams and reams
that must be written when I wake.
I’m driven onward for her sake.
If my muse should feel abused,
believe me, she is not amused.
She mounts my back and spurs me on
until all her words are gone––
released upon the teeming pages
while she rides off to join the sages
sitting there upon the shelf,
and I am left with just myself.
This new hibiscus popped up and surprised me today. I almost forgot to take its picture, and by the time I did, it was twilight. I took several, hoping one would come out okay, but there were several I liked so sharing them all, even though the color isn’t quite right.
Click on photos to enlarge.
For Cee’s FOTD
