Parabola

 

 

 

 

 

 

Parabola

 

 I've clerked all my life 

in the Ministry of the Moon,

a fixed point on her long ellipse,

recording her perigees, her apogees,

her slow apotheoses,

while she lays

 

her lean silver arms across

the back of my chair, penciling in 

corrections on my sedulous tallies

of tides the heart has taken in

given out, or given up.

These are not erasable

 

but sometimes she

strikes out a line

changes my totals

with her flickering hand,

all in pencil, all by moonlight remote

and hard as hammers;

 

but the sun is her bright clown, only

on fire to fill her midnight eye,

so who am I

not to dance along?

 

 

 

 

last day of June, 2025 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for Word Garden Word List at

Shay's Word Garden 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Aurora vortex, author unknown, via internet   Fair Use

Dark Dancers, ©Gina Jacob     Fair Use 

 

 

Moon Fluff

 

 

 

 

 

 

Moon Fluff

 

(a 55)

 

 I found the moon last night

thrown down in a puddle,

kissing with clouds, a peppermint undone

fished from your pocket-fluff, 

sticky

but still sugarsweet, 

still shiny

with its two-toned jewel-jazz glaze

like that one clean note you'd hit

in your sax-fiasco blues,

tasting of 

lemon and light and

 cold

December 

rain

in the night. 

 

 

 

December 2024

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for Word Garden Word List

at Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: The Moon, 1929, © Salvador Dali     Fair Use

 

Sabbat

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sabbat

 

 

 

I saw the moon in the devil's eye

when October rode in on her horse of bone.

The night began to weave the sky

dark and darker, cold and high,

in deep black strands from a witch's comb.

The heart of a bird pierced on a knife

hides a ferric flute and a rusted ladle.

Her blue feathers dropping, her downy white,

leave her butterfly bones to the freeze in the night

while the moon shines bright in the devil's cradle.

Nine shadows come and then three more

to swing five times round the balefire's flare.

The wind robs the roof and opens the door,

puts a wet salt skin on the bedroom floor,

slips on a sorrow too old for despair.

Wash him with blood and dry him with silver.

Float him away on a lye-thick river.

Cross his red forehead with your gnostic brand

but the moon still shines from the devil's hand.

 

 

~October 2024

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for Word Garden Word List at

Shay's Word Garden 

where she asks us for a bit of rhyme this week

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Walpurgisnacht,© 1923 by Heinrich Kley  Public Domain

Skullshot © joyannjones

 

Factory Girl

 

 

 

 

 

 

Factory Girl

 

I remember that midwife year

you found me at the factory

holding the hand of water and

making shadows for the moon.

It was the year of cakes and blood

 

when everything was sharp with fear

waiting to be lost or born back to me

piecemeal in a box of sand.

You had a gambler's gift for tongues; fortune

loved to ripple where you stood.

 

Three times I turned a rose to tears.

Three times I spat your sugar melody

on the ground. Three times I made a man

from fire to fit your form; too soon

I saw the fourth time was no good.

 

Now I have no dreams, just hands

on fire for the work expected by the moon,

and faces in the ash I never understood.

 

 

January 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for dVerse Poets

Poetics:Rimas Dissolutas

and including words from

 The Word List #7

at Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Record Breaking Workers At The Factory ©Pavel Filanov  Public Domain

Lightning and Volcano, unknown artist, via internet.  Fair Use

 

The First Crack

 

 

 

The First Crack

The first crack

always seems easy to mend,

an almost invisible fracture in

 an otherwise perfect thing; so, too,

 the first pock on the face of the moon.

Yet let a few years pass and her skin

is a ballgown of craters.

So I knew when the peacocks

cracked November with their

idiot's scream, when you spit the last

 blackberry from your stained lips, that the

 first bleach of sun on Rhea's hair

would turn your head, 

make you thirsty

for the black cup of ocean, the yellow

manes of lionesses blowing on the sand,

the kelp smell and the wind-draggled lillies,

leaving me alone in this Pharisee's garden

with nothing but a raddled moon

and the smugness of

peacocks.

November 2021

posted for Shay's

Word List

 

 

 

 

Rhea was a Titaness, a goddess, daughter of the earth goddess Gaia and the sky god Uranus, the consort of Cronos and mother of Zeus, as well as grandmother of Persephone and Dionysus.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Lunar Craterr, 2015, ©Æstronomær shared under a Creative Commons License

Peacock Consorts, © Charles Tunnecliffe   Fair Use

 

The Moon Nurse

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Moon Nurse

 

 

Someone must guard the moon

deep in the Dreamer's long shatter.

Someone must keep clear her pathway

mirror'd on the wavering water.

 

Someone must nurse the moon

when the red plague slips in without trace.

While Time ticks to its last empty hour

let my hands refresh her pale face,

wash it with rosemary's greening,

herb airless void with white smoke

between her and the storm oncoming

where light itself is revoked.

All the nights she's held watch above me

by the bed where sleep loses its way,

the silver songs she's sung me

put a debt on me I must repay.

They say she poisons the fallen

who ravage across the wide earth,

or stare in electrical cages

where madness has gone to give birth

 

 but those 

she brings whole through the hunter's dark

burn tonight her evanescent spark.

November 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for Poetics

at dVerse Poet's

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note: this poem has been revised a dozen times since posting, and I'm still not happy with it. It didn't rhyme at all at first, and now it rhymes too much. I blame Poe, whom I've been rereading WAY too much lately.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: ©Dmitry Brodetsky  All Rights Reserved   Fair Use

Author and title unknown, via internet      Fair Use 

 

Three Wheels

 

 

 

 

 

Three Wheels

 

 

 

I dream the ghost;

an old woman who sits staring,

tendril-wrapped in the cold wet

wood with her soft face

washed away.

 

I dream the ritual;

an old woman who pedals

fast, pedals frantic, hunched

simian over three thin wheels

meant for a child.

I see the flooding quarry

and what they dig there that

 must not be found. The old woman

pedals madly, seeing all that goes

around and round.

I dream the Völva;

a grey woman who throws back

her unmade face and howls in runes,

traveling Time with red eyes

she calls from night.

I hear the pack's full cry loping

as one; to rend, to tear, to save

the secret moon before

she can be dug

from the water and sold.

 

 

October 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for Fireblossom

at The Sunday Muse

 

 

 

I have written this roughly in the cadralor form, tho I have taken a few liberties with it. 

 

 

 

Process Note: Völva: "A Völva is a female Shaman in Old Norse culture, religion, and mythology..A Völva practiced three different kinds of indigenous magic within Old Norse society: Seiðr, or shamanic ritual, was the ceremonial weaving of a new or different future..Spá, or prophecy, was the art of foreseeing the fates that were being continuously woven into existence by the Norns.. Galdr, or incantation, was the art of singing or chanting for the purposes of changing or influencing an outcome..." ~Shieldmaiden's Sanctum

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images, both via internet, attribution unknown.   Fair Use.

The White House

 

 

 

 

The White House

 

 

Fall is sky

of milk and water, of

sand and blood, a field of ev'ry fruit

and folly, gathered around the slant white house that

rocked its boards like a boat and took in

the moon's footloose orphans.

The white house 

grew a child;

it seemed safe there by the

warm muddy lake,rough beach of red dirt,

trees bent over brown water by the weight of locusts'

spell chanting out the night, the old gods'

didgeridoo. There were

always dogs

 

in the yard,

toys on the floor, music

in the hall, food in the kitchen, bells

of laughter rung on blue sheets, your bright virgin eyes

umber as winter oak, wild as wine,

alight in the white house.

Now the child

 

is grown, you

are gone, and nothing is

safe. The white house, drifting in its trees

by the clouded lake, is a slow rocking boat un-

manned but full; October's hand turns wind

 to firelight for moon's

last orphan.

September 2021

 

 

posted for 

The Sunday Muse

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Process Note: This poem is written in the triquain form, consisting  of seven line stanzas with lines of 3,6,9,12,9,6,and 3 syllables respectively.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Old house, author unknown, via Sunday Muse  Fair Use

Autumn Day circa 1986,  © joyannjones 

 

Another Fall

Another Fall

It's a cold cascade through time,

from the strip mall of memory

to neon horizon,

from green waves of forest

to the needle's eye of the heart,

through which the rich, misshapen

moon must pass like a camel,

before the mimes and jokers

intervene. That tumbled road

from the crack in my back

to the crack of your indecision,

Oh I've walked it many times,

chained to my cane

with the Milky Way lambent above

and flat below the putrid detail

of those thousand lies, illusions

masks and false affidavits

that came with your smile.

Now it's time to fall again, in

the beam of your death ray eyes,

an Icarus returned without wax

to  original components,

a thing of feathers and sky

far lighter than either air

or these dark whims, to learn at last

the language of goodbye and bury

 with the bones the syllable why

~December 2019 

Written to Kerry's skylover word list for December:

 

Images: What A Human Being Is, copyright Hilma F Klimt, Public Domain

The Fall of Icarus, copyright Marc Chagall, Fair Use

via wikiart.org

Friday 55 December 8 2017

Welcome, fellow travelers. Another Friday finds us collected here to assemble our jigsaw thoughts into our own 55 word puzzles, and to remember Galen Hayes, the originator of this meme. There are no rules, strings or obligations, except that you write a piece of prose or poetry in 55 words--no more, nor less-- and post a link in the comments below between Friday morning and Sunday afternoon. Comment moderation is off now as I am so often out of pocket these days, but I still wield the ban-hammer and will delete any trollish appearances.

So, this week, winter came...

First Day Of Winter

I woke to a turquoise sky

with nothing in her pockets; no sun,

no moon, no scrap

of smoke or cloud. 

Day was missing,

night had wandered off.

My mind was all she had, sister

twinned to her blank eternity,

summer's embers 
ashed to blue clinker

without a tear to soften us

until the rain.

~December 2017

 

Image: Roman Nose Park, Turquoise Sky, 11-29-2014, ©joyannjones  Manipulated.