Not Much Choice!
The prompt today is Finite Creatures: At what age did you realize you were not immortal? How did you react to that discovery?
I wrote “I’ll Have to Go” to this exact prompt last November. To see that poem, go HERE.
Empty Nest
She tugs at the remains of some bird’s last year’s nest,
then flies away with material for her new one
while the father hovers near, watching the small bird
tumbled from another nest three days ago
and brought in my dog’s mouth for Susanna to discover.
“Open Morrie, open!”
She pried his jaws apart to find the small bird whole
inside his mouth,
rain soaked and bedraggled,
his tail feathers either gone
or not yet grown.
For three days, we sheltered the baby bird with heater on,
taking him for feedings on the garden rock
where his father and mother could find him
and return once or twice per hour to fill him up
like a small mechanical bird
purchased in the market
who, when wound up, hops
then sits dormant until fueled again.
This small bird for three days and four nights
survived, hale and hearty.
Loud chirps brought the mother, at first,
until yesterday, when we could see
a new nest in construction.
Then the rufous father came, first to the rock to feed him,
then later, clinging to the sides of the cage
to fill their nestless chick like a small car
from the fuel pump.
This morning dawned overcast,
and though the chick needed feeding,
when I neared the rock,
I felt his tremors
and took him back to the house
for another 10 minutes warming,
then tucked him into an old nest
I’d found years ago and saved.
I hoped for protection
and warmth and security,
perhaps a memory of the nest he’d fallen from.
Then I carried him in his cage
back to the tree to be fed.
From the hammock,
far enough away to pose no threat,
I watched the father’s descent
and an ascent too quick.
Then no return,
so that when minutes later I searched the cage
for the small bird tucked into that scavenged nest inside,
I found the nest empty–
one ruffled back against the cage bottom,
claws curled upwards.
There is no difference
equal to the difference
between a body chirping–
wings pulsing–
and its empty husk
after the life has left.
No question bigger than:
What is life that we can only see it
through what it inhabits,
and where does it go
when it soars away?
I buried Little Bird in this planter underneath the yellow flower.
With a stick covered with the favorite seeds of finches hung overhead.
Prairie Grass
Prairie grass waves over the spot where my parents’ house used to be. Its roof was blown away in a tornado years ago and the house leveled, the basement filled in. What physical remnants of my past remain beneath this dirt I’ll never know as members of the family were all far-distant when the tornado hit and no one ever went to clear out items stored in the basement. I’m told townspeople came in and scavenged in the basement before it was filled in. A friend took my childhood books for her children. I have no idea where other letters, books, trophies and assorted treasures from my past ended up. Perhaps they are buried there.
Across the dirt road is the cemetery where we all will lie beneath prairie grass one day. Yes, I was moved to tears both by the beauty and the inevitability that all our fuss and bother will result in this simplicity. We rise from the earth, feed on it and in return are fed upon. No person is so special as to survive the inevitable leveling force of nature.
Daily Prompt: In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “Moved to Tears.” Describe the last time you were moved to tears by something beautiful.
The Window
opens onto an empty lot.
Guamuchil trees and wild castor beans
rise from its slope to lift toward
where I sit above, hands engaged
in taking me away to a place
far beyond ideas.
It is that destination dreams only point us to–
that place where, perhaps, I’ll float
after the feared moment
when I’ll leave this world for good.
I dread it so, that zone,
and yet if what my fingers have just told is right,
it’s where I choose to go again and again,
escaping to that little house
down in my garden
where I keep my tools and paint
and ten thousand small objects
all of which have a particular place they want to be fastened.
I am just here to help them go where they want to go.
Where they have, perhaps, been created to go–
taking me with them to the zone,
all of us
headed toward
the inevitable.
“The little house” is my studio, here seen from the garden. The earlier view was of the wild lot next door, seen from the window of my studio.
A message from the zone. Click to enlarge, then hover over objects and click again to see more detail..
The Prompt: Tell us about your favorite way to get lost in a simple activity — running, chopping vegetables, folding laundry, whatever. What’s it like when you’re in “The Zone?”
The Dance
Cheek to cheek and toe to toe,
whenever graceful dancers go
smoothly passing while I stand by
feet motionless, with dancing eye,
jealousy may rear her head
as I wish that it were me, instead–
held securely in my partner’s arms,
guided surely away from harms
of other dancers’ straying feet
or jutting elbows I might meet.
Steered through dangers into bliss
barely meeting the floor’s long kiss
as I soar and bend and sway and glide,
giving way to what’s inside
the music coming to live in me
setting all that’s in me free
stirring sadness at my core
and leaving it upon the floor
for other dancers to kick away
while only light parts choose to stay
within my heart as I dance on
from dark of night into the dawn.
I might feel sorry, sitting there,
no arms around me–only air.
Then I remember in the past
dancing nights I thought would last–
how all those partners have stepped away–
even the ones I hoped would stay.
Life has a way of leaving us
like hopeful riders passed by the bus
as it soars away with no seat left
those left behind feeling bereft.
Then I look deeper and clearly see
one day that bus will stop for me.
Something heavy grows inside
where it’s not good for it to bide.
I scoot back my chair to shift that stone
as I get up and dance alone.
The Prompt: The Green-Eyed Lady–We all get jealous now and then. What awakens the green-eyed lady in you?
Each and Every
Each person is born to turn into a memory.
Every beginning is the beginning of an end.
Eerie the truths we start to face with time.
Earnest philosophers find a happy ending.
Elders will soon become the newly borne.
Eiderdown falls to rise again.
Either we believe this, or we spend
eternity trying to know it.
Every ending is also a beginning.
NaPoWriMo Prompt: Write a poem backwards. Start with the last line and work your way up the page to the beginning. Another way to go about this might be to take a poem you’ve already written, and flip the order of the lines and from there, edit it so the poem now works with its new order. (I selected the first alternative.)
WordPress Prompt: Fearful Symmetry—write a poem where every line begins with the same letter.
https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/fearful-symmetry/
Routes Laid Out by Heavenly Bodies
The road of the moon
on the water
is a bridge
between us
leading me
to our new self.
When I am ready
to return
to what I was
before you,
that road
has vanished
but the sun
lights a different
pathway
and sends my shadow
ahead like a door
I seek to enter.
The oldest moon,
the sun at its birth
or just before its death
create in us
just the suggestion
of a road.
That is why we rise early
for the sunrise,
gather for the sunset,
spill old blood,
howl howl
at the open moon.
This poem meets both prompts today. The NaPoWriMo prompt was to write a poem about a bridge. and the WordPress prompt was “When the full moon happens, you turn into a person who is the opposite of who you normally are. Describe this new you.”
Today’s prompt is to write a visual poem. This is one I tried to publish earlier this year when WordPress was not accepting pingbacks, so perhaps not many have seen it, and certainly not in this form, as when I published it, it was all evened out into regular stanzas by the blog formatting. It occurred to me to save it in jpeg and treat the pages as photographs and that seems to have worked.
The Prompt: Weaving the Threads–Draft a post with three parts, each unrelated to the other, but create a common thread between them by including the same item — an object, a symbol, a place — in each part.
Rings of Saturn
I had taken off my wedding ring years before. How typical of me that I would finally put it on again after he died. I don’t know why I do these things. Perhaps it was easier to be married to a dead man, or perhaps I felt he had finally atoned for his bad behavior, but suddenly that symbol had more significance than it had come to have in life. That sainthood of departure. I’d seen it happen again and again, but I had never been one to run with the pack and so it surprised me so much when I looked down one day and saw his ring on my finger again that I took it off and it has resided in that heart-shaped jewelry box ever since. That jewelry box with the little slit-compartment for rings that my sister’s friend had brought as a hostess gift when she had come to visit during that long year after his death when everyone came out of the woodwork to come visit.
Draw a ring around the old. Ring in the new in multiples. Duplication has become such a science–the craftsman thrown out of the ring. With the new three-dimensional copier, what cannot be duplicated, if plastic is your creation material of choice? A plastic gun—complete down to the bullet in its chamber. A perfect functioning model of anything with moving parts. Can each grain of gunpowder be duplicated? One ringie dingie, two ringie dingies. Floating away on the surface of the lake of forget. Is that giving up? Ringing the final buzzer? Burning the evidence in a ring of fire? Burning bridges? A phone rings and rings in the distance. It has that ring of authenticity, but that does not mean it is real.
Ring of thieves. One by one, the days steal my life away. Time is that one thing no one has control over—even Einstein or Hawking who perhaps understood it more than anyone. Estee Lauder, Timex, Time, Incorporated–all profit by time but none have conquered it. We are all in the ring with it whether we know it or not. Others may take the black eyes or sound the buzzer, but we are all really fighting the same fight. The smoothest face still wrinkles and the most beautiful voice grows shrill with age or disappears. Buzzers go silent and the arms holding up the signs go saggy. Ring around the rosie. Ring around the rosie. Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.
https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/weaving-the-threads/
You would think there would be some remnant left,
but death was simple.
You were there and then you weren’t.
After one deep ragged breath
you were so gone that even your body
seemed to miss you. That stillness
so irrevocable. So not right.
Our friends all came
to see the place where you had been,
bringing offerings
to fill the void.
It was a full-packed house–
your sons, their wives, your daughter–
eight of us filling out every hollow corner.
I slept in the bed meant for two,
trying to convince myself I was enough–
trying to fill in the space you left.
That empty cup.
The Prompt: Cut Off–When was the last time you felt completely, truly lonely?
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 