Hues

 

 

Hues

 

 

 He was just 

 

one of too many

born black for the factory

taught to make salt

 

into roses and clocks, just

a sole to spare the parade marshal's foot,

a board for the floor, another pot

 

of coffee for the landlord

but there was something

he got from the moon; that weary

 

knife-smile, a jones for books and

bitter truth, a taste of jazz

in his blood, and so

he became instead

the blister on the heel, the knot

in the plank, the spider in the cream,

the argument for faces.

 

 

 

 

January 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for 

Shay's Word List: Langston Hughes

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note: The photo above is a snapshot of Hughes with his good friend and fellow activist, Louise Thompson Patterson, both thorns in the side of contemporary white/status quo culture as members of the Communist Party and prime movers in the Harlem Renaissance.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: The Shoemaker,  1945, © Jacob Lawrence   Fair Use

Louise Thompson and Langston Hughes, shipboard, circa 1915-1925  Public Domain

 

 

 

 

 

The Tree With All The Body's Roses

The Tree With All The Body's Roses

"She sang beyond the genius of the sea. 

The water never formed to mind or voice,   

Like a body wholly body, fluttering

Its empty sleeves..."

Wallace Stevens, The Idea of Order at Key West 

The world has parrots.

I'm looking for a songbird

in the jade well of deep forest,

a voice to bucket it up.

Behind the plastic house 

I found blue wildflowers,

watched their petals transmogrify

to wings on seeds 

 blowing like the freckles of stardust

mottling the Milky Way,
to daisy-face another autumn day  

in indigo beyond the swirling suns.

All this because a thousand years ago

in banished nights the apprentice read to me

words of a Northern heart washed up

 on a bleach and dazzle of tropic sand;

to me, his caryatid, words for a girl

 he loved I'd never be, that 
magic could not make me,

to sing beyond the genius of the sea.

Yet she brought me here, that girl,
a statue suddenly animate,

to dig and weed the heart's ground
beyond the ocean drench of chemical hope,

past youth itself in its naked greed, til at last a tree

would raise the mind's branch on which

a bird could land and sing

of all the body's roses we

never see.

~October 2017

 for October's Heart-Bits with Magaly 2017:

"The topic is simple: Love Is Love Is Love… and Words. Let’s art our loves with words in them. You can share a story or poem about why you love writing poetry, or telling tales, or singing, or painting, or dancing, or sculpting, or knitting, or bedazzling the skulls of your enemies and friends… write about the art you are happiest to create.
Your posts must contain at least one magical element and some sort of love(dark love, sweet love, ridiculous love, terrifying love, insane love, gentle love…)..."

(I hope the  young love and transmogrifying magic here is enough, even if it didn't exactly work as planned by the magician's apprentice. )

Rosa 'Pat Austen' ©joyannjones 2013
Clouds in Finland, by Konrad Kryzyzanowski  Fair Use

Medicine Bag

Medicine Bag

A bag too small for summer

and not so big as a heart

but sufficient for

crucible's residue

burnt fine, 

ash and

the errata and

the mouse-bones

of dreams.

I wrapped these things

in heat and feathers, 

with the sleep

of flowers laid on them

into its soft doeskin dried in salt,

beaded with the name of dusk, that

kings' song of battleroar

lost to cricket-harps;

my talisman ticket,

my blue rose bag of wishes;

to close

or to open so

the petal that falls

is the drift of your step,

is the corn-colored wind,

the easy air 

that knew your face

by starlight, your bright cadence

your fragrance and the savor

of  meadow moon sun-broken

floating on the slope

before the raven's rattle,

before the long defeat.

~July 2017

for M.'s   summer words

Process note: The phrase 'the long defeat' is spoken by Galadriel in the seventh chapter of The Fellowship of The Ring, by J.R. Tolkien: “For the Lord of the Galadhrim is accounted the wisest of the Elves of Middle-Earth, and a giver of gifts beyond the power of kings. He has dwelt in the West since the days of dawn... I have dwelt with him years uncounted,...and together through ages of the world we have fought the long defeat.” It's become something of a catchphrase among Christians and/or conservatives, but we won't let that stop us from appreciating the metaphor.

 Image: Native American Medicine Bag, author unknown, via internet; fair use

Rose With Stars And The Turning Year

Rose With Stars And The Turning Year

The stars mind their own

business. The wind runs grasping

up and down the night

arms stretched,

thrashing the impassive trees

with its flapping desire.

Here below: only a bickering

of whelps, the sinuous peristalsis

of the snake, the mechanical revolve 

of all his poison-spitting brethren  

churning and contracting,

knocking the Parthenon down

and your hand, poised, your voice

whispering, your eyes that watch and shine

on every petaling memory made

of the rose under windy stars

pinning the mind 

close to her fragrance by her thorn.

The year turns

with a flash in darkness,

an onslaught of velvet;

a last
loose ruby shut away

in a box.

~October 2016

Image Public Domain: Roses, 1871, by Henri Fantin-Latour. Manipulated

Morning Light

Morning Light

A Quatern

You are morning of my last day
the saw sun that cuts through the bars
the smell of earth as frost lifts
the runes and stars on my back

dripping off the indigo night.

You are morning of my last day;
a thunder that promises rain,
a place where the outside comes in,

where blue sky of invisible moon
blankets a raised lacework of scars.

On the morning of my last day
you're a rose wind with too much to say,

my foxfire harp in the dawn, 
the tectonic bend at the end;
how I'll never know where you are

like the morning of my last day.

~February 2014

 posted for     real toads

Sunday  Form Challenge: The Quatern

Kerry O'Connor once again presents us with a fascinating form to explore: the quatern. She informs us: 'A Quatern is a sixteen line French form composed of four quatrains. It is similar to the Kyrielle, which repeats line 4 as a refrain throughout the poem. However, with the Quatern, the refrain is in a different place in each quatrain....' For full details, see the link above. After much experiment, I chose not to rhyme this one, except coincidentally . There is also one line with nine syllables--you will just have to shoot me.

Top Image: Cape Cod Morning, 1950, by Edward Hopper

Footer: Early Morning, 1942, by Rene Magritte

May be protected by copyright~posted under fair use guidelines.