These photos were taken within a 30 minute period when I was in the pool very early Thursday morning. and started when all three dogs came up at the same time vying for my attention. Some of the photos definitely need to be enlarged to see them adequately. To enlarge photos, just click on them.
for CBWC Candid photos prompt
Mexico Saves Daylight
Nobody knows
what this new day
has in store for us.
The colors stolen by night
have not come back yet––
only the string of miniature Chinese lanterns
strung on the patio
glow their soft tones:
lavender, yellow, peach, rose, lime green.
Powered by energy stolen from the sun,
they light up this very early morning darkness
otherwise lit by the random stars of
streetlights undulating over roads that wind up foothills.
The mountain peak named Señor Garcia
stands against the gray predawn sky.
Colima volcano peers over his shoulder,
half-obscured by mist and clouds.
My day emerges.
Scatterings of lights twinkle
from the small pueblos across the lake.
Bats swoop and dart
after the last insects of the night,
then speed impossibly into second-story tejas
for their communal day’s rest.
The hot tub cover,
submerged a few inches beneath the water’s surface,
forms a mirror for the wild hair of palm trees.
Dried leaves rest on the water,
swirling in the breath of morning.
Roosters crow.
A cacophony of bird calls:
“Me hee hee hee hee hee. Me hee hee hee hee hee Me.”
scolds the most persistent of the lot.
Mourning doves answer in a register from another time.
The grind of trucks accelerating on the roadway far below
too small for trucks.
Church bells speak their language,
tolling the morning hour.
The round
subtle drone
of unseen bees
takes precedence
over all other sounds
as I move to the gazebo.
I picture a whole hive
moving to new quarters,
starting that process over again,
busy giving birth to their new home,
perhaps in the stark Guamuchil tree
that survives like a dinosaur
among the castor beans
in the jungled houseless lot next door.
Like one of those internet birthday cards
where an invisible hand
yields a brush
over a black and white drawing,
slowly, colors lost to the black night
emerge through the fog
of earliest morning blues and grays.
Rose pink of the first hint of sunrise.
Colors of houses on the mountains:
vivid orange and gold,
lime green and blue.
Bougainvillea silhouettes give way
to curly detail and bright color:
fuchsia, orange, peach, gold, brilliant white.
Three green foam noodles lie abandoned poolside,
caught in the arms of aloe vera
and by the crown of thorns.
Green washes the hillside
around the gold and brown
of last year’s corn stalks.
The diverse calls of grackles
join the morning conversation.
Quetzacoatl spreads his sinuous frame
over the entire wall above my bedroom doors
as though stretching his kinks out for the day ahead.
7:30 A.M., March 8, 2020,
announces the computer screen
glowing on my bedside table.
Coral sheets and a blue pillowcase.
A large watercolor of a woman
with birds perched on her shoulders
and her hands.
I yearn to go back to bed,
but time changed here
in the very early morning.
It is an hour later
than it was
the same time
yesterday.
Morning Ritual
Boy cat awakes at six o’clock
to begin his morning walk
across my former sleeping self,
then jumps down from my bedside shelf
to continue his aggressive sass.
Wrestles the rug, then bats the brass
light cord, yowls and kneads the sheet
until I rise. Admit defeat.
He leads me to the kitchen door.
I let him out , but do no more.
I don’t renew his empty dish.
No new beef and no new fish
adorn its naked metal sheen.
It’s six o’clock! I’m feeling mean.
Back to bed until at eight
the dogs begin their loud debate.
The girl cat’s where the boy cat’s been,
taunting them from here within.
She jumps up on the headboard table,
disconnects my laptop cable,
turns off its screen and then what’s more,
knocks the lampshade to the floor.
Jumps down and then attacks the rug—
A slide-attack, a pull, a tug—
until once more it’s hillocked, rumpled.
twisted, skewed, distressed and crumpled.
Now the dogs both go ballistic
and I, alas, become realistic.
Thrust myself up from my bed,
and after both the dogs are fed,
I give in to the cats’ loud din—
one cat out and one cat in.
One says good-bye, one says hello. One seeks to come, the other go!
When I shop, I buy the flavor I know their highnesses most favor.
Walk barefoot over the cold floor,
open up the outside door,
and, stepping out to feed the cats,
I open up the cupboard that’s
located by the kitchen door,
to grab the cat food can, but then
as one cat exits, one rushes in!
I spoon the goop into one dish
to tail-swaying and whisker swish.
Pour kibble in another one,
step back inside and watch the fun.
Seeking nutritional renewal, they fall upon their kitty gruel
Sharing a dish, cats bob and sway
in graceful pas de deux display.
Alternating, dish-to-dish
from wet to dry, whate’er their wish.
And finally, the herd all fed,
exhausted, I go back to bed!
Prompt words for today are goodbye/hello, brass, renewal and favor.
Early Morning Ecstasy
That surge of elation when I awaken
is because the next hours have not yet been taken.
No obligations, no duties or meetings.
I can follow my heart—pay heed to its beatings.
I follow my thoughts wherever they please.
I milk them for meaning, fingers on the keys.
Does my mind correlate with the sound of the birds,
Or are the birds harmonizing with my words?
The climate is perfect right here in my head,
computer on stomach, stretched out on my bed.
The word prompts for today are: Elation, Awaken, Climate, Correlate and milk.
The more I slow down, the more rapidly the days seem to slip by. This oxymoron dominates my thoughts in those wee hours when I am trying valiantly to sleep. The awareness of how quickly my life is advancing into its third trimester plugs up my throat until I find it hard to breathe. I fumble for the door key, open the sliding glass doors and slip out onto the patio to gulp the cool night air.
The dogs circle round, Morrie drops hopefully in front of me, a ubiquitous green tennis ball in his jaws. There must be one of those balls hidden behind every plant in my garden. Just four months ago, I had bought five tubes of them at the sports goods store—each containing three balls. I was about to set out on my yearly two-month trip to the ocean. I wanted the house sitters to be well-supplied in everything, and the balls were on sale, so I had purchased what I thought would be a lifetime supply. But those balls seem to have vanished as quickly as the two months since my return home had. Two days ago, I had purchased two more tubes of balls. They sit unopened in the doggie supply vault that stores the large bin of dry dog food, a small fridge that holds the wet food I add to the dry food twice daily when I feed them, and other doggy paraphernalia: leashes, collars, medicines, rawhide bones, doggy biscuits.
And so this is a ball he must have rapidly reclaimed from some garden shadow when he heard my key in the lock to the terrace. I bend and reclaim the ball, then throw it over the pool down into the lower garden. Almost as soon as my arm falls to a vertical position, he is back with it again––everything in life seeming to speed up as I slow down.
Now, hours of insomnia and fewer hours of sleep later, I hear him whining on the other side of the security bars outside the open bedroom sliders. He would now have his morning come on more rapidly as I lie, computer on chest, writing my morning blog. I have slowed the world down for long enough. I find an appropriate ending and swing my feet to the floor, in search of Crocs. Time to get in line with the faster world’s schedule, at least for the time it takes to feed the dogs and cats.
Click on any photo to enlarge all.
The prompt today is rapid.
full moon morning 2 jdbphoto2017
Morning Matins
Cuddled and chirruping, choirs of birds
trill from their tree limbs in boisterous herds.
Like broken crystals, they tinkle in showers,
cacophonous clashings from high hidden bowers.
We cannot see these hermits in their hiding.
Until the sun rises, they will not be gliding
smoothly on air currents, sliding and slipping,
deft and most daring while doing their dipping.
Now a clashed chirping, like the chipping of ice.
The cooing of doves and a rooster crows twice.
The masked moon is waning, obscured by the light
as the first rays of day do away with the night.
Then the wrens take to wing and the grackles glide in.
Flycatchers and orioles desert where they’ve been.
They make their curtain calls, then spread their wings
in pursuit of their breakfasts and other bird things.
vermillion flycatcher jdbphoto2017
Being a night owl, I am so rarely up at 5 in the morning that it has been years since I’ve experienced the awakening of birds in the full moonlight before the sun has yet come out. It was like a concert listening to birds awakening, still obscured by darkness and their sanctuaries of trees.
The NaPoWrMo prompt for day 12 was to use alliteration and assonance in a poem.
full moon morning, jdbphoto2017
4 A.M.
It is too early to be stirring, the world is still asleep.
The sound is all still slumbering, the darkness is too deep.
No dayness stirs the nightness. No touch is reaching out.
No stirring and no blowing. Not a whisper. Not a shout.
When I wake before the world does, it seems the end of things
instead of the beginning, when the whole world sings.
Sun rises and the birds demand. The dogs whine for their feed.
All the world around me awakens to its need.
But for now, they are all sleeping. It is a lifeless world.
Its eyes and ears and mouth closed, around me densely curled.
The NaPoWriMo prompt today is to use alliteration. This is quiet alliteration, like the poem. Not too much. Just a touch!
Jalisco Morning
First the sky opens up as the sun rises, then the flowers do!
https://dailypost.wordpress.com/photo-challenges/morning-2016/
In The Dark
Lush Night
Remember that delicious walking, arms linked, down the middle of the gravel road in your pajamas at five in the morning when you were twelve? That first slumber party in your safe small town when you all stayed up all night for the first time in your lives? That eerie first sight of the sun coming up when your head had never hit a pillow since it went down?
You knew then for the first time the delicious pleasures of being a night owl— of finding time that everyone else was wasting through dreams. And you have been an aficionado of night ever since. All of your term papers and exams studied for at the last minute, all night long. Books written, poems written mostly in the dark while towns and cities around you slept. That power of having all of your time for yourself with not a chance of phones ringing. Some magic happening once you had the world to yourself so ever afterwards you have survived on as little sleep as possible.
During your party years, dancing and drinking till three, then going for breakfast with the single crowd and driving straight to school at six. You were invulnerable.
Even married, sneaking out of bed once he’d fallen asleep and working in your basement studio all night long, sometimes sneaking back to bed before he awakened, at other times caught. “It’s nine in the morning! Have you been up all night again?” Feeling that little terror, like a vampire caught by light.
Then at 54, with no more husband, no more job necessary, with a new country and a new studio above ground, guilty pleasures no longer needed to be hidden— watching light after light go out as you sat piecing art together in your studio—until suddenly,
impossibly, light after light went on again so you were going to bed as your neighbor was arising to start his day.
Then, improbably, at 62, internet romance entered your midnight-and-after world as
every night you were serenaded to sleep from 1500 miles away by an equally night-addicted lover bard at two or three or four a.m.— or whenever pillow talk led to it. Skype became your love letters and your trysting spot ––night swaddling that intimate invisible union through the dark air that had always been magic for you, but which now joined you to another instead of sending you into the single space where you united with that within you which you kept separate from the world.
Now as always, united or alone, at night you know exactly what it is you want and live it, with no busy world to lead you elsewhere.
This is a rewrite of an earlier response to this prompt, and here is yet another piece i wrote on this topic: https://judydykstrabrown.com/2015/06/25/re-tired/
And here is another one about waking up in the morning!: https://judydykstrabrown.com/2015/02/25/head-shots/
The prompt today was, “Are you a night owl or an early bird?
Early Birds at the Beach
When I am at the beach, the first light of day for me is always the moon, which is still up at 6 when I begin my beach walk. If I’m lucky, I’ll make it the 5 miles to Boca de Iguana and back before the sun is fully up. Much as I love sunlight, my particular pigment demands that I enjoy it from the shade.
As the sun comes up but does not yet peek over the mountains and palm trees, the birds and I comb the beach. I find an already-drying starfish. The Caracara bird finds a fish, the sandpipers and gulls various delicacies barely buried in the sand. Before me, I see only two earlier human birds than I, their evidence left by their footprints.
https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_photo_challenge/early-bird/
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 