From my pool in the Raquet Club, San Juan Cosala, Mexico, 7:51 PM January 6, 2025
Click on photo to enlarge.
A Remarkable Sky
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Tag Archives: stars
Midnight Communion
Midnight Communion
Grass dampened by the night air sprouts beneath me as I lie
here beneath the swirling stars that spark an empty sky.
The moon sketches my shadow against the garden wall,
temporary art that holds me in its thrall.
Caught up in the orbit of a world that must astound me,
I am sister to a universe that’s breathing all around me.
For the Sunday Whirl Wordle 565. the words are: damp stars sparks swirl sisters breathe empty sprouting shadows sketch orbit art. Image by Josh Miller @Unsplash.
Last Preteen Summer
Last Preteen Summer
Lemonade days and popcorn nights,
mosquito hums and chigger bites,
stars like bullet holes in the sky
and meteors like years gone by.
On our backs in summer grass,
we buried childhood en masse,
obsessed with coming teenage years
and all our questions and our fears.
Cars passing in the still-warm night
held our expectations tight.
Eavesdropping, we heard the cries
of older girls and older guys
cruising the town unaware
of prepubescent listeners there
sheltering in my backyard,
watching stars and trying hard
to imagine teenage joys
like nighttime rides in cars with boys.
For the Tuesday Writing Challenge: Lemonade Days.
Cropped image from Diego on Unsplash.
And, since I’ve just been informed that this is last week’s Tuesday prompt, I’m posting to their ‘Promote Yourself Monday‘ link as well.
Southern Cross for dVerse Poets
Southern Cross
Spread low on the horizon,
stars stretched on a rack of sky.
Star-crossed lovers that we were,
standing sternward at midnight,
sea spray whispering our names,
sleep sacrificed for starlight,
secure in each other’s grasp.
For dVerse Poets: Pleiades Poem.
Dversepoets.com We are to write a Pleiades Poem. 1 word title, 7 lines, each 7 syllables beginning with the first letter of the title. Photo by Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash, used with permission.
Celestial Harvest
Celestial Harvest
Whenever I see stars, I get these rambling sort of feelings.
My soul soars out to meet them, abandoning its peelings—
my body left behind as though left back in a cave
with stars studding the ceiling—the rest of me not brave
enough to chance the journey away from what I know,
but I release my spirit, hoping it will sow
flowers of remembrance whenever it deems
the time right to come back to plant them in my dreams.
HERE is another piece I wrote about star-gazing four years ago. I found it while looking back through past blogs to try to find a photo to illustrate this poem.
Prompt words today are stars, ramble, feeling, antre (cave) and sport. Photo by Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash. Used with permission.
Sub-tropical Skies: Open Book
Open Book
Here beneath the Tropic of Cancer,
the sky is a book opened to the wrong pages.
The Big and Little Dippers?
Pages ripped from the spine.
Orion a well-thumbed page,
held directly overhead like a book
read lying on my back.
And is it fact or fantasy
that once I saw the Southern Cross
stretched on its back
near the horizon
to the south?
Floating half-asleep with mists
of water hot from the volcano
rising around me,
was it a dream or real,
those four twinkling stars
seen just once before that night our boat
slipped over the equator?
Then, as now,
all time seems wedded—
afloat in a universe
of stars and water—
tiny no-see-ums
forming their own active constellations
as they whirl up over the water
and back down in clusters.
Wee moving
stars.
Kidnapped
jdbphoto
Kidnapped
Trapped by my imagination, heading towards a star.
Suddenly, that far horizon isn’t very far.
If I don’t resist it, it is always there for me,
and when I’m with it, I am in the best of company.
The prompt words today are trap, imagination and horizon. Here are links:
https://fivedotoh.com/2018/11/24/fowc-with-fandango-trap/
https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2018/11/24/imagination/
https://onedailyprompt.wordpress.com/2018/11/24/your-daily-word-prompt-horizon-November-24-2018/
NaPoWriMo 2015, Day 2: Stars
Stars
Sometimes, on an Indian blanket spread on the night-dewed grass, I became aware of them.
They were always there waiting in the ever-clear South Dakota nights.
Anything could have happened on a night like that,
Reclining with no ceiling over us,
Silence split by crickets, frogs, the chipped barks of dogs.
Summertime freed us to the great outdoors.
Traitors to our beds, we chose the long-grass cushioned backyard.
Attacks by neighborhood boys an exciting possibility,
Rescues by my bellowing dad, in jockey shorts, standing on the back porch.
Sleep not on our agenda for hours afterwards.
Slumber parties meant for anything but slumber.
Taking a walk at midnight and crossing the path of no one.
Air in the night a different elixir
Returning to roll in the grass in shortie pajamas—that pre-sexual thrill.
Stars of our own summer, we strutted our stage until the wee hours.
Something in the night freeing something in us.
Taken by the stars to other selves, far above us.
Aware of the mysteries laid out like a path in front of us.
Returning reluctantly to our pre-teen lives,
Safe beneath the dangerous stars.
The WordPress prompt today was to write about texting, but Since I have never texted anyone in my life, thought I’d tell you what life was like in a pre-text world. And here’s a picture to go with both the subject of texting (old-time style) and the above poem:
https://grieflessons.wordpress.com/2015/04/02/a-photo-a-week-challenge-muted-colors/
https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/its-a-text-text-text-text-world/
“Web of Night” April 2 Post
I’m participating in this program where I’ve taken an oath to write a poem a day. Here is today’s poem! I need a website to link to their website, so I’m using the only one I have–this one. By the end of the month, there will be 30 poems here…
Web of Night
We have been talking online for hours
and, as usual, lost track of time.
Now, after his good-bye,
it would be easier to go to bed
than to act on his reminder
that there should be hot water
in my hot tub tonight,
pumped in earlier from the volcanic depths,
left to cool all day.
I am living in sub-tropical Mexico
where things like volcanoes are everyday things.
I drink the volcano.
I swim and soak in it.
I absorb its heat,
draw from its power,
grow stronger.
This is the fountain of youth, I’ve often said.
Too long away from it, I start to grow creaky and old––
reversing those effects only by coming home again
to lie in its steaming bath.
I look up from it now
at a night sky unlike any other––
only the major stars distinct, like light seen through
irregularly perforated steel. The stars standing out individually,
between them the remarkable floss of clouds stretched
sparse as angel hair on a Christmas tree
to reveal the ornaments
between.
No one else awake in this morning hour
so early that it is really still the night before.
2 AM. Neither a dog’s bark nor a burro’s bray.
No harsh staccato though the cool night air
of air brakes of trucks
too wide for the two-lane carretera.
down below.
Alone in my world.
The clouds, while I’ve been thinking blind,
have obscured the stars
behind a thicker web of cotton wool.
I think of love so far away,
wishing it nearer but feeling it close
as the keyboard in the room behind me.
There are many of us
caught in this Web of internet romance.
Here we need not fear
the loss of a love
that is a part of an addiction
to the mystery of absence
yet words so close
they are almost
but not quite
touch.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 