Today

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today

(a 55)

 

 

Today is an old day,

leaking

the passed night's rain,

 

almost with its dawn already

yesterday,

faded replicant of another supplicant.

 

I'd throw it away, used-up as

a broken comb, a flared match

fired once to light something gone,

 

except

the birds

greet it with such celebration

 

singing

their soft explosions

above the autumn seeds. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 September 2025

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Images: Girl Combing Her Hair, 1892 © Edfward Munch   Fair Use

Three Tree Sparrows In A Rain Shower  © Ohara Kosun    Public Domain 

Promises

 

 

 

Promises

 

 

 

 

 When I was first a woman,

a proto-woman, perhaps,

I fell into the sin

of promising.

 

A jumbled barter it was

of all I had, masks

and early roses and melodies

too simple to be songs

 

all, all underfoot in the

maudlin marsh of fool's dreaming

with braggarts croaking their

whisky throats like toads.

So, into the desert

hot and clean, clear and cold,

but there again I fell,

into the assassin's bed.

Every night I knew

his nerveless cunning,

slitting the throat of love

as I lay numb

listening to devils

laughing from the killing-stone,

waiting for your call to come

tenacious and startling-sweet 

 

on limpid air

as jasmine in the abattoir;

but in the blood-pool

only sticky silence.

Now that time has taken

all the gods and fools

that made me woman,

I see with a child's eye

grateful to be lone 

with meadow-wren and violets,

 promises of fairies, friend of

crows and stars.

 

 

 

November 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for

Word Garden Word List: Stephen Crane

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Woman with Mask, artist unknown, via internet Fair Use

Faery and Kingfisher © Jean-Baptiste Monge   Fair Use

Eurydice

 

 

 

 

 

Eurydice

 

 

 

I was a god's nymph of the deep ravine,

a dancer in the dusk on dandelion greens

til listening to you I felt a dog's duress

that I in your spellsong's locket be possessed.

Under the purple awning of the night

whitened stars beat down in falling flight.

I felt yet didn't hear your naked voice.

I took and later rued an arrow's choice.

And when your always-wooing sleepless noise

drew the jackal out from the sour wood,

I tried to turn and run as best I could;

you played untouched as the snake saw me destroyed.

Even then you could not let me rest,

bright in poppy sleep in the dreaming earth

but played until your will outgrew my worth

and petals bloomed on the stone of Hades' breast.

But as you pulled me up the iron route

I saw my dandelion days were all undone,

and rejoiced in the malediction of your doubt,

freed at last where death and dreams are one.

 

 

 

 

 February 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for Word Garden Word List #14

 Pablo Neruda

where I am hosting this week for Shay, who is taking the week off. Come join us!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note; This poem has absolutely nothing to do with Neruda, but it is what the words on the list brought out. In the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, Eurydice is seduced by the legendary music of Orpheus and his harp and marries him. One day the minor god Aristaeus sees and pursues her. As she runs away, she is bitten by a viper and dies. Orpheus famously follows her to Hades' underworld, where his singing persuades the god to let her return to the earth. ".. the condition was attached that he must walk in front of her and not look back until both had reached the upper world. Soon he began to doubt that she was there, suspecting that Hades had deceived him. Just as he reached the portals of Hades..he turned around to gaze on her face, and because Eurydice had not yet crossed the threshold, she vanished back into the Underworld...Several meanings for the name Eurydice have been proposed such as true judgement or profound judgement...In some accounts, she was instead called Agriope which means "savage face" ~wikipedia

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Orpheus and Eurydice, 1515,  relief by Peter Vischer the Younger Public Domain

Eurydice Bitten By The Viper, 1508, Titian  Public Domain

 

Warrior

Warrior

The warrior walks

across the sky tonight

spinning the tale of resilience

twisting the tale of valor

wearing the worked hide of stars,

supple in battle yet

turning no blade;

marked for an early death

or a bloody age--

yet who would want to pass

through this night of sorrow and wrong

without a fight?

~Election Day, 2016

Image; reproduction of the Golden Horn of Gallehus, via wikimedia commons

The Third City

The Third City

The orange grey sky,

the maple that reels like a punchdrunk boxer

under the fists of the wind,

the metalpunch that's moved in

behind my left eye,
the icemaker home

in the specimen bottle,

floating in a pious pickle, little pig fetuses

taken unborn from my pen;

this is my city of day

but under my bed is a highway
blurring lights, sleeping

up the staircase green hills

blackened by night and a fogfull sky,

from the golden-gated park to

the golden-girled beach looking for your dark eyes,

deeper than the mines, in the City

that needs no name

nightwarm and whispering California,
curled like a child's fingers

round the hand of my heart;

but in the crosshairs of dawn

my feet greyed with sharded dust

from the madman's white temples, I'm here

in the City vanished, the City made flat

as the infinite Horizon of Aten

by the sledge of centuries

remote as the moon

wiped clean of the gods

and all folly of men, home

where the parch-wind and the murderer sun

and endless night and I have come to live forever
in the dead sky, nowhere left to run.

~August 2016 

posted for    real toads

Challenge: Get Listed

Notes: The City: A term used around the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California to describe San Francisco.

City Of The Horizon of Aten: "Amarna (Arabic: العمارنة al-‘amārnah‎‎) is an extensive Egyptian archaeological site that represents the remains of the capital city..built by the Pharaoh Akhenaten .. and abandoned shortly after his death (1332 BC). The name for the city employed by the ancient Egyptians is written as Akhetaten  in English transliteration. Akhetaten means "Horizon of the Aten[sun disc] "    ~wikipedia

Optional Musical Accompaniment

Top image: dustbowl sky  © joyannjones 2014

Footer: Small temple of Aten, Amarna, by Einsamer Schütze, via wikimedia commons
manipulated

Sacrifice

Sacrifice

Chaos is too strong

and takes up too much space

so to sweeten it away, 

we say

we must make sacrifice.

Never ourselves, no,

but something we pretend

is quite important, beautiful,

or dear, yet when the blade is done

will not be missed.

Chaos is too quick

on its feet. We thieves

swindle out no bright salvation here

shifting barefoot in the ash

the lying Order of our tears

dried by the furnace breath

of Chaos laughing.

~July 2016

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 posted for   real toads

Weekend Challenge

Image: A Sacrifice, Govanni Battista Piranesi
public domain via wikiart.org