Scattered Dreams
She mourns the loss of everything as the crescent moon
fades away to nothing this putrescent June.
Orange blossoms drooping in their wedding urns,
an empty flag of wedding veil wafts outward and then turns
to fall from spinning fan blades where it has been tossed—
all its beauty shredded, its inspiration lost.
Her hopes and dreams now fatuous, their ending is now lore
written in tattered satin and petals on the floor.
The RDP prompt today is “Scattered.”
Adventure’s End
“Holy smoke!” the young man cries, pulling on the reins,
his heartbeats quickened, sending blood surging through his veins.
This glorious adventure—this quest across the plains,
fording raging waters, swollen by the rains,
seems to have turned against him as the arrow whizzes by,
shaving off his hat brim just inches from his eye.
He cradles fear, as weeping, he whips the plodding team,
prodding them to frenzy as though within a dream.
The bitter taste of panic, one brief surge of regret,
causes him to finally accept his sobriquet.
When his mother named him Chauncey which his dad shortened to “Chance,”
it signaled wild adventure and dangerous romance,
and as he set out on his travels to find fortune and fame,
not once did he consider the two sides to his name.
Now he rests forever beside that lonely road
that in his youth he thought would lead him to the mother lode.
For Sunday Whirl Wordle 660 the words are: holy plains waters beats travel weeping veins cradle rained taste brief glorious Image from Unsplash.
The Escape
Lips pressed against a crystal glass,
she gazes at the stars.
A prisoner, she scans the sky
from Jupiter to Mars.
Within this arranged marriage,
her future has been cinched.
Trapped within tradition,
her fire has been quenched.
Blind terror fills her body
as she thinks of what she’ll lose,
for it is another
she’d have if she could choose.
A pity that she has to take
this means of her escape,
as she tucks the lethal bottle
in the pocket of her cape
and drinks the draught in one fast gulp,
then lets out one long sigh
as she enters that dark tunnel
that leads from Earth to sky.
The Sunday Whirl Wordle 628 prompts are: blind lips body escape pressed pitied tunnel lose trapped fire glass stars (Image by Louis Galvez on Unsplash.)
Epitaph on a Hilly Gravesite
Claim custody of the mourning that has led you to this place
and cease your arduous journey so that you may face
that foggy veil of sadness and the fiery coals that burn
deep in that place within you as you sink into the fern.
The sentence of your heartbreak becomes a paragraph—
that surety you’ll never love again, or smile, or laugh.
But nature is a circle that spins us on its wheel,
balancing the joy and pain of what we feel.
What we have been given will be taken in the end,
for all of nature’s riches are only here to lend.
Give thanks for what you’re given and accept what must be rendered,
for every happiness is preordained to be surrendered.
Prompt words today are fern, paragraph, mourning, arduous, fog and custody.
She Passes By
Each variation in your eyes
betrays their normal veiled disguise.
Wistfully they follow one
by whom you have been undone.
As they follow, hither and nigh
each time your former love walks by,
she who trampled on your heart
once more upsets the apple cart
and affection tumbles out
and draws you like a waterspout,
wistfully to tumble there,
your tender hopes high in the air.
But false illusions must fall to earth
where they discover their true worth
as they are trampled into earth.
Prompt words today are eyes, tender, trample, nigh, variation, wistfully.
The Changeling
At heart I am a changeling, born of fairy stuff.
Reality and daily life simply are not enough.
I yearn for the forest, the valley or the ness.
The only place where I’m content is the wilderness.
And though siblings are rosy and love to laugh and shout,
frolicking like puppies as they roll about,
my skin is wan and pallid and I do not care to play,
keeping mortal company constantly at bay.
Faux parents can’t facilitate my raging appetite,
nor my predilection for the deepest night.
I was born of different stock, unsatisfied and mean,
preferring solitary life, untouched and pristine.
And though I petition that I be let alone,
those who come upon me, alas, are often prone
to try to draw me out, an act that I rebuff,
for I find myself to be company enough.
Somewhere in the forest, in a cavern or a tree,
I know that there resides the opposite of me,
living far away from the place where they were born,
dreaming of the family that they miss and mourn.
Two unhappy doppelgangers, always just off-mark.
One languishes in daylight, the other in the dark.
We stand before a funhouse mirror and without a doubt,
One is looking into it, the other looking out.
While somewhere in the vast lost world, parental arms are aching
for the child that long ago was of their dual making.
What evil force declared that both sets of parents should pine
for the natural-born child each yearns to claim as “mine?”
Those who seek disruption wander through our life,
seeking to take action that cuts us like a knife.
War and rape and pestilence, disorder and melee,
substituting one child and taking one away.
What more brutal action than this cruel deflection
that subverts two tiny lives, causing lifelong dejection?
The human-born and changeling, forced into different lives.
A honeybee and hornet forced into warring hives.
The changeling and the one replaced, both of them misplaced,
yearning from the life from which they’ve been displaced.
Who can blame their solitude, their yearning to be other?
Wanting to take one life and trade it for another?
Prompts for today are changeling, pristine, petition, facilitate and wilderness.
Note: A Changeling is a fairy that has been substituted for a human baby. While changelings can look like anyone, they do have a true form. Their natural look can be scary to some due to their lack of detail and distinctive features. Their skin tone is always pale, either white or light gray, and they tend to have slender bodies with limbs slightly longer in proportion to other humanoids.The surest way to tell if you have a Changeling on your hands is by observing the temperament of the human in question. Changelings are constantly unhappy, unfriendly, and mean. They may be very cold and aloof, and may even recoil from human touch. Changeling babies’ appetites are never satiated. They may develop nocturnal habits and are abnormally aware of paranormal activity. The mortal child is taken back to the realm of the fairies to be raised and put to work, while the creature left behind usually sickens and dies.
Sad
Falling
straight
through
gray
skies
into a
world
of
blue
mosaics,
rain
is
sad.
Photo by Shane-Ha7FZYLEmA on Unsplash. Used with permission.
Ennui
If she weren’t so frangible, she would be independent.
Her causes would be epic and her actions more resplendent.
She could get more exercise and wouldn’t be so stout.
She’d be so much more sprightly if she could go out.
Her initial actions if she weren’t so fragile
would be acts of daring so spellbindingly agile
that the world would view her as a wonder. Oh, if only,
perhaps then she wouldn’t be so weary and so lonely.
Words for the day are stout, epic, initial, frangible and independent. Photo by Shane-Ha7FZYLEmA on Unsplash. Used with permission.
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.
photo by Phil Hodkinson on Unsplash, used with permission
Mr. Havisham
His eggs and toast at breakfast are balanced out with kippers.
He dines on them in satin robes and tiny velvet slippers.
Later, it’s his riding habit, whip securely fisted,
although hinted-at stables have never quite existed.
Fantasy and artistry consume his waking world,
as though it’s here that childhood dreams are finally unfurled.
That unexpected ostrich plume, this candle-scented air?
What we see as ostentatious, he maintains is flair.
This flair abounds around him everywhere he goes.
He waves it like a banner from his hair and clothes.
Lacy collars, pompadours and velvet tailored suits
match French provincial furniture and tiny pointed boots.
He hardly knows the difference, now that he is older,
and does not notice as those dreams begin to fade and molder.
His costumes growing threadbare, his candles melting down,
he no longer draws attention wandering through the town.
He has become a fixture, slowly fading in,
shuffling into the future, forgetting where he’s been.
All the single people, constructing lonely lives
creating their personae in unique little hives,
all of us so busy we fail to heed each other,
seeing as a stranger who might have been a brother.
We concentrate on all those differences we see,
choosing to see difference instead of what could be.
For more eccentric behavior, go here: https://judydykstrabrown.com/tag/eccentricity/ Too bad these two never met.
Prompt words today are ostentatious, flair, unexpected, difference and clothes.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 