Ballad Of The Earwig

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Ballad Of The Earwig

(a 55)

 

He was the earwig come up through the drain,

she the rosebud ruined in rain,

 

she the actress losing her looks,

he, strutting hero of unreadable books;

 

they a brainstorm dying in rage,

they, two monkeys shaking a cage.

 

I am the pony who runs with the storm,

you, blue fire that burns without warmth. 

 

 

April 2025 

 

 

 

 

posted for Word Garden Word List

at Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Earwig, metal sculpture, artist unknown. via internet   Fair Use

Blue Fire Wallpaper, artist unknown, via internet,   Fair Use

Firefall

 

 

 

 

Firefall

 

 

 Lightning falls tonight

along the border of change.

Summer made a brass mirror

hot as Hell's floor to flare

the prairie grass to fire. 

Now her demon child

walks the storm.

We built a tall white tower

a colossus to catch the wind

for us to eat. With a flick of

staggered shot the lightning felled it

melting it

like an interrupted dream.

And so it was

when you and I

met to hold the lightning

in our palms, flaring in

a mutual fire, to give back

the reflection of love

from eyes of brass. Too much

heat cracks the shell.

Too much

of the electric touch

and towers melt,

lightning falls singing

a crackling song that says:

no one can own me

only the end I bring them.

 

 

August 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for earthweal's weekly challenge:

Lightning Falls 

 

 (with apologies to Brendon 

for shamelessly using his theme title)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note: Last night we got one of those wild storms that pop up along an advancing front. Most of it missed us here at my location, saving some very welcome thunder and rain, but parts of the state got flooding downpours, downburst winds up to 75 mph, and a lot of lightning, a bolt of which melted this wind turbine in Custer County and set it on fire.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Volcano and lightning, author unknown, via the internet. Fair Use

Burning Wind Turbine, Custer County, courtesy of Oklahoma News 9 Weather, Fair Use 

Stormlight

 

 

 

Stormlight

Rain-giver, hail-maker, tornado-farmer,

May's black hammer mesocyclone bouquet

falls into the world; 

a twist and wrench

of chaos-stacked air that knows

only one gamble,

hanging its fate,

its otherworld gate

over wheatfields and wiseacres

it will strip down to skin

in a boiling of sky,

where one will be wrecked

and another spared

by the luck

of the drawing wind.

After the storm,

the crash gasp flash drama,

light is softened,

sky-wrapped in puff-clouds

like a newborn in crochet.

Trees stir and push

to their wild/calm lover.

Birds streak back in sepia

down to a world

neither colored

nor monochrome.

 

We ride these last days

between daggers,

between fear and relief,

between the holy

and the unholy,

the quick and the dead

 

watching domestic

disputes of drunk giants

from a mousehole of hope.

 

 May 2022

posted for earthweal's

Spirits of Place

Mesocyclone: A storm-scale region of rotation, typically around 2-6 miles in diameter and often found in the right rear flank of a supercell (or often on the eastern, or front, flank of a High Pressure storm). The circulation of a mesocyclone covers an area much larger than the tornado that may develop within it. Properly used, mesocyclone is a radar term; it is defined as a rotation signature appearing on Doppler radar that meets specific criteria for magnitude, vertical depth, and duration.~NOAA Weather

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Binger, Oklahoma F4 tornado of 22 May 1981. Courtesy of National Severe Storms Laboratory, NOAA Public Domain via wikimedia commons

Stormlight, May 2, 2022 ©joyannjones

 

Three Tigers

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Three Tigers

(a 55)

Three tigers by the sea

waiting for my company,

frightened by the gunner's moon;

three tigers hungry soon.

Three tigers in the millet;

artist, lover and a poet

find their game, make it run,

eat the work when they have done.

Two wet tigers in the storm;

 I laugh and keep the good one warm.

 

 

 

 

 April 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for dVerse Poets

Open Link Night

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Images: Dream Caused By The Flight Of A Bee Around A Pomegranate A Second Before Awakening,1941, ©Salvador Dali  Fair Use

Tiger In A Tropical Storm-Surprised, 1891, ©Henri Rousseau  Fair Use

 

Lightning Tree

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Lightning Tree

When I was a child

pewterblue eyes round

as green walnuts, yellow pigtails

pulled tight in shredded rubber bands

I breathed up a world where I

lived in the storm, thunderheads panting like

mastiffs, tongues lolled over the lake, wind

secret as the monster under the bed

smiling, lightning fairy-dancing

into a forest 

of wild branches;

I didn't blink for the peace of it

covering the screaming, the blows,

cleaning my face

 

of a toy's tears. 

I breathed it in, petrichor

and the smell of power,

a brew of walking cobwebs

that piggy-backed me away,

a broken-eyed Dorothy doll

searching for Oz.

 

When I asked you to

kiss me like rain, you took me

up high on the lightning tree.

You had a web there, gunmetal strong

and sticky with grief. On the 

edge of those sudden wires,

one foot already caught

 

you don't even know you're dead.

When you fight

to run with one eye blind, 

and feel the tremble

coming closer

 

you learn everything

you lost

 

  all

you never had

 

 and that you 

can never trust

a storm.

 

 

 

~July 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for Fireblossom

at The Sunday Muse

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Note: Comment moderation has been turned on. Apologies for the inconvenience.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Images: Lightning in West Texas © Ryan Smith Photography   Fair Use

Broken doll, via Sunday Muse   Fair Use

 

Sunflower Summer

SCROLL DOWN FOR THE FRIDAY 55

Sunflower Summer

Ah Sun-flower! weary of time, Who countest the steps of the Sun:
Seeking after that sweet golden clime Where the travellers journey is done. 

~ William Blake

 

It was a sunflower summer

counting steps to the sun

as the heat ran away

after a bad opening night.

Monarchs and hummingbirds

trimmed the yellow-gold plates,

bright beads of Christmas glass.

Rabbits came to the back door

with tea and grass hats

asking the way to Wonderland

til everything went south

blind as salmon in time's reckless river.

I spoke crackling long distance

to the place where you'd been.

It was noncommittal, polite, quite

willing to take a message, yet

I never heard back,

though every sunflower

turned its gathering face to you

in that unmaking summer

of black rolling thunder

in the East, lightning crawling

in the navy blue clouds

towards

a red greed of fire, tree-torches smoking

 a banshee wind in the West.

The scorch of mankind

opened its heart to the storm

and the storm came inside

 like Jesus in a circus tent.
 

Still,

against autumn's flood

the sunflowers pack light

into rucksacks of seeds

for the traveler's journey

 to come.

 August 2020

posted for 

The Sunday Muse

and earthweal's Open Link,

(for Mondays theme of Storms and Rainbows)

Images: Sunflowers, artist unknown   Fair Use

The March Hare, © John Tenniel circa 1865  Fair Use

Storm Rocket

Storm Rocket

The big storm comes, rattles

the latch of night, batters twilight

with its troll voice and god hands,

throws soil from a thousand raped fields

at my face, dry earth's stripped debris,

melted smell of dirt-charged void

electric as the ghost of your lips in the dark.

I'd wear it like a rocket, follow it, fly with it

to that other land where wheat sings to

the living earth, lightning is a dreamer's

 dance and storms sigh down

a cobweb of emerald rain;

but seventy years of hot wind

have made me small as dust,

a pygmy trapped in

this unbreakable

walnut-shell

of pain.

May 2020

posted for The Sunday Muse

Images: Sky in Saskatchewan, author unknown, via internet  Fair Use

Rocket, by Brad Phillips   Fair Use

Black Apples

Black Apples

I was a daylight shadow,

a bride of drought

cast over the mounded world like

a prophecy of night,

living on dandelions and dead leaves

until you gave me,

sour and hard on the flat 

of your incubus palms,

a dozen black apples. Keep them,

you said, for a year. I only ask

that you throw the bones

far away from this dry country

from the death dance of wheat

the victory of locusts

the smoke of the Beast.

Disappear us too close

to the rifting abyss

where the wind's sullen heat

turns the Catherine wheel of change,

show me the hiss of

the scythe in the clouds,

the minarets folded in sand
whose pierced towers pour out

the last blood of solitude sung by
the owl. All our ghosts will join hands.

There's the crack of your laugh;

a ragged breath of earth

to bend and break the dead trees;

the witch-year's burnt up. You and the

drought have gone and I

sit tasting unmourned

the twelvefold sweetness of 

black apples of the storm.

March 2020 
This poem has been slightly revised since first posting.

posted for earthweal Open Link

and Shay's prompt at the Sunday Muse

Arkansas Black Apples

Catherine wheel:a firework that revolves on a pin, making a wheel of fire or sparks; pinwheel.

~dictionary.com

Images: Untitled photo, by Horst P Horst for Vogue Magazine, 1930   Public Domain

Arkansas Black Apples, ©sweetsandlife via Atlas Obscura   (see link)   Fair Use

Friday 55 June 15 2018

Another midpoint in another month brings us once again to the 55, that meme originated by the one and only Galen Hayes in what has to be called the dim recesses of blog history, when so much was so different...except the rules, which remain the same: link your 55 words of prose or poetry, no more no less, in the comments below between Friday and Saturday at midnight, and I will be by to read.

My scrabbled together 55 this week:

Smell Of A Storm

You wear again

the smell of a storm,

fumes of a dream.

Your shadow stands in smoke,

gaming the dying sun to

light your cobra eyes.

I reach out

now as I did then

before summer nights

gave their souls to snow;

 this flash and bang

this show 

is all of you I'll ever know

~June 2018

Note, still having internet issues--bear with me if I take forever to get to your link. I am leaving comment moderation off so you can still read each other's if I am MIA.