Witch's Broom

© Mama Zen Photography

Witch’s Broom

This is the motherland that once

raised outlaws, took in

orphaned indians,

hard dry land glad to get

hardluck sodbusters, mail
order brides, snakeoil
salesmen,abdicated gamblers
lost cause gunmen,
backslid preachers

all desperate some determined

to settle down;

but the blood never settles.

Wild it was

and wild it is,
thick and crazy

in mazed veins newborn

to the task of casking it.

Faults crack her red plains, 

bootleggers become

meth labbers, outlaw thugs
gladhand politicians, medicine show 
preachers preach tea, believers
still empty bellied, indians ground

fine as powder still fighting, and 
always the rule of the gun.

Prairie grass in plumed heads flags

the verge of wheel ruts schooners cut,
now blacktop well oiled where

each growth is history and testament, 

some strong and taking, upright
shadows bible black,

some bent, twisted, killing 
slow, curling into oblivion.

The body settles but

the blood never will;

each generation throws out

its witch’s broom anew

dark spores spit careless on the wind.

April 2012

Posted for    real toads

Sunday Challenge: Photography of Mama Zen

Process Notes: Witch's broom is the name given to various diseases causing deformity and unusual growth in shrubs, woody plants and trees, often showing a distorted fanned out shape or drastically tangled, contorted appearance. I've stretched the definition by applying it inaccurately to grasses (and humans) here. 

Header photo: Horses, by Mama  Zen

Used with permission.

Footer photo: Ziziphus microonata, By Rotational (Own work) [Public domain], 

via Wikimedia Commons

Unappeased

Unappeased

Appeasement is not immortal;

any stomach will tell you that

there are wastes where shame

never shows her face.

Hurricanes don’t build

however many bricks they pile

one on another as easily as 
on a tree, dog or tomato

or inject into a snarl of wrecked

timbers, limbs and broken glass.

But age is soft snow yes

I know it is

bitter cold, blurring, preserving

as it dances down, and silences

everything except the hunger that

can only be appeased by returning

empty and calling, 
bubbling from the base, the
melted voodoo doll of self, 
suddenly become many

lumpish revolving homunculi, 
misshapen cells

oozing up through the thick blue

boiling lava lamp abyss
in improbable, million-pieced

egg shapes and rhomboidal failures

all eventually defined, potent,
inexpressible, fused or refused 
revealing, merging, 
unappeased;

it's only movement that 
endlessly

draws the eye,
the wax is stiff at first
but still the same.

March 2012

Posted for   Poetics   at dVerse Poets Pub

Shawna of rosemary mint is hosting today, and asks us to revisit the year 1999 in our lives; I've skipped on a few years, and found a journal entry from the closest date I could and worked from that, but the essence of what was going on, and the feeling are the same, I think.

Header Image: August 2002, Journal, © Joy Ann Jones, 2002, 2012
Footer Image: Lava Lamp, by forbidden snowflake, on flick'r 
Shared under a Creative Commons 2.0 Generic license

Optional Musical Accompaniment, Playing when Journal entry was written

Freyja Speaks to the Skalds

Freyja Speaks to the Skalds

Now I call you, brother

across the ticking void

Feel my hand in yours,

over the scars and tears.

I’m with you where you sit

milling the weary hours

finer finer into a dry flour

that chokes the heart’s pores

for it’s bitter bread

as I was with you

when you raised the promise-cup

in Midgard’s torch-red halls

and played for swinish ears 

that ragged tune

of stars and battles, destinies of glass

of ebbing tides and the bones

of love’s last child, with

the gods' last dance

there before

we wore our names,

when your hand spiraled

deep in the womb black cave, 

lining for me the ochre herds

wallrunning to fill the stomach

of evernight with life

for all eternity’s migration.

I held you up

in your thin skin boat

of fancy's faith and grief;

I tried you, through the floods 

of high seas’ anchorage,

through the dark blood conquest,

holding the dripping blade. In

the stone-ringed grove

under the crooked moon

I spared your life, 

left you one-eyed, lamed but singing

in a tinsel of smudged neon night

on a winedark streetcorner wave

where every loss collides

in subway clamor or benched

in garden’s dusky still, for you my

pole-circling breath melts and blows
the spice of far Carib, because

I call you brother.

Under threads of silver gold

where seven shed skins make 

a thorny crossroads of your face

still you vigil for the heartsong.

Hear my fade note whisper on shadow wind:

call me, call me, always I will come

but when the sun pours through

white curtains and every

bell is ringing

of course the spell

is broken and

I’m gone.

February-March 2012

Posted for    real toads

Challenge: Love and Affection 

"I write because I love it."

~Joan Armatrading

I've had this one in the works awhile, but this prompt really helped it crystalize and while it may seem an odd choice for the theme in some ways, it is about love, the tenuous, pervasive and demanding love  between the Muse in all her guises and her chosen victims and celebrators, along with my usual magpie mix of Norse and other myth, history and prehistory, some of which I owe to the Celtic and Early/Post-Christian 
mytho-poetic synthesis of Brendan MacOdrum of Oran's Well. 
Thank you Brendan, for Lascaux, the coracles and the garden bench.

Freyja: in Norse mythology, a goddess associated with love, beauty, fertility, gold, seiðr(sorcery), war, and death. (Technically,her brother is Freyr, per wikipedia, among other things 'a phallic fertility god,...[given] Álfheimr, the realm of the Elves, as a teething present.')

skald or scald:
 —n    (in ancient Scandinavia) a bard or minstrel
[from Old Norse, of unknown origin]~World English Dictionary 

Promise cup: 'The bragarfull "promise-cup" or bragafull "best cup" or "chieftain's cup" (compare Bragi, [god of poetry]) was in Norse culture a particular drinking from a cup or drinking horn on ceremonial occasions, often involving the swearing of oaths...'~wikipedia

Image: Freja, By John Bauer 1882-1918 (www.uppsalaauktion.se) [Public domain], 

via wikimedia commons

A Poem and A Progress Note

Lemons

Even lemons tart as a forced smile

will leave your fingers sticky

when you squeeze them dry.

How many more acidulated drops

left, invisibly inked and slow

to leave the pen

only browning

to sight in a certain sparse heat,

not enough to burn, barely enough to warm

sour on the tongue, pale on the paper of

the one who can’t even write them out loud?

Hold me like the fire holds the flame,

lick these salt and bitter words away

take my breath and keep it warm for me

till I need it,

when tomorrow makes me pay

for all this lemonade I threw away.

February 2012

Progress Note: As many of you may know, I had a rather nasty fall last week dodging a car which took a blind curve behind us while my husband and I were out walking the dog around our normally idyllically deserted neighborhood. I ended up severely straining my left knee and taking an acre (or so it feels) of skin off my hands, elbows and knees. After undergoing some tiresome procedures and a regimen of anti-inflammatories, antibiotics and mild pain killers, I haven't been in much shape to write or return visits. I am improving greatly, however, and am up and around now, no harm done, just healing slowly and a bit dazed still. I hope to be able to return to participating in all my normal online activities soon. Till then, I've put up a poem from last month to reassure everyone I'm still alive and kicking.

My sincere thanks to all who've come by here to read and commiserate, or contacted me to offer their concern.

Image: Header Photo:  My lemon, by Smaku on flick'r

Footer Photo:  lemons, by chotda on flick'r

Both shared under Creative Commons 2.0 Generic License

Another Poem Written at Morning

Another Poem Written at Morning

for Wallace Stevens

We always were

as different as two things can possibly be

as far apart as a white bear on an ice floe

from a neon flamingo preening on one leg

or a thinking mouse in a live trap

from the distant hawk that stoops.

We always were

as close as two feathers nesting in

coralpink scales on that same flamingo, 

as mouse and thought, 

as the freeze of boreal ice

to the bear's shaman paw.

When all there was to read 
was ratscratch and pigeon droppings,

you'd already written for me

the encyclopedia of myself;

Go on through the darkness, you said

The waves fly back.

When my only drawing was child's

chalkdust, fumbling baroque intricacy into

crude streaks, you painted my adjectives in oils

with the extravagant precision of a Poussin,

carved from cloud within the sister, mother and

diviner lover, out of our own imperfections wrought.

Ever you were truer to me than any breathing man.

Even now in the room where the interior paramour 

lights the highest candle, begins the twilight music, 

I bend in the dance with your businessman's stone 

in its calico gypsy shirt and cobweb shoes,

still try to read your book of granite mossed

with shadows, sudden lightning burst over 

inkblack seas pounding meaning

in constant making and unmaking, 

whispers calling, fill the four corners of night

flutter your empty sleeves, 

it's the spirit that we seek,

 

ask often. No matter if answering is all reflection,

dimmer, poorer through prosthetic eyes;

let them shine and serve, let the wench's tongue wag,

if only in echoes softer than tumbled shells suspiring 

on a ghost beach, because you gave not killing order

but the idea of order 

that grew the garden that saved me

from the domination of black, sent

dreams of baboons and periwinkles,

put peacocks in the

heavy darkness of hemlock,

rejoiced in green curls.

February 2012

Reposted for Meeting the Bar: Literary Allusion   at dVerse Poets Pub
Victoria is hosting today and this poem seemed to fit her challenge to write an answer to another poem, as well as cite a literary influence.

 

 

Poem Written At Morning

  

by Wallace Stevens

A sunny day's complete Poussiniana
Divide it from itself. It is this or that
And it is not.
By metaphor you paint
A thing. Thus, the pineapple was a leather fruit,
A fruit for pewter, thorned and palmed and blue,
To be served by men of ice.
The senses paint
By metaphor. The juice was fragranter
Than wettest cinnamon. It was cribled pears
Dripping a morning sap.
The truth must be
That you do not see, you experience, you feel,
That the buxom eye brings merely its element
To the total thing, a shapeless giant forced
Upward.
Green were the curls upon that head.

Italicized words are quotations or titles from Stevens' poems.

this was originally posted for   real toads
where Kenia's challenge was to dialogue with a poem or poet.

Image: Diana and Endymion,  by Nicolas Poussin [Public domain], via wikimedia commons

Butterfly

Butterfly

In out out in without disruption

warding the shell's inevitable corruption

in billowing sighs where the Master sits

the apprentice is peeking with eyes like slits

blind to a logic of infinite drops

in out out in till the raindance stops

each moment alone in a trance of calm

a butterfly netted in the silent palm

in now where his fingers play

out now already flying away

December 2011

Some nursery rhyme styled couplets for 

Gay Cannon's FormForAll prompt at dVerse Poet's Pub 

Lead Balloon

Lead Balloon

Zeppelin among

red balloons

maraschino'd 

in a whip cream sky,

buffoon baboon among

soft-eyed lemurs

graffiti’d wall above

wavesmoothed

pebbles

puddled jellyfish

on the white beach

she knows

no one looks at

her face

she knows

fat girls

have to put out

she knows

all she has

is between her legs

or in her purse 

she knows 

it doesn’t matter

in the ten minute funhouse

mirror of their eyes

she can see

bent, elongated, fuzzy

what she could have been

if she were real.

December 2011

Posted for    Poetics   at dVerse Poets Pub

Brian's hosting a prompt this weekend featuring the graphic art of  Tera Zajack

Come join us.

Image provided by Tera Zajack

of olive hue designs

Used with permission

Beeing in the Woods

 

Beeing in the Woods

Deep deep into the woods today;

don’t look back but only down,

down where roots foxtrot

 cross the padded ground

wearing amberorange gowns 

that once fit green on their branches.

Walking all day, the bow of wind plays

counterpoint on celloed limbs;

 bees’ licorice saxophones drone in the fennel,

butterflies drinking beside them wary

with the flinch and nod

of old men at a pub.

Yellow light fashions its pollen heavy and sweet

filtered through finger-laced trees; 

jazzed up we and the golden-legged bees

turn at last to go back

taking what we carry

to the hive.

September 2011

Posted for Poetry Jam

Image: Photo by Ainslee Allmark

website: Dolphin Visions

Words

Words

Write your soul a blanket on the page

with black wrinkled stripes on pure white,

in any tongue on earth. Throw

your zebra quilt over

every shivering   

heart and offer

refuge there,

wrapped in

words.

July 2011

Posted for       Form Monday   at  OneStopPoetry

This poem is in the Nonet form, a nine line single stanza poem where the first line contains nine syllables, and each succeeding line one less, with the last line a single syllable. Thanks to  Corbie Sinclair for this great look at the form, with sincere regrets that this is Gay Cannon's penultimate appearance hosting Form Monday.Thanks for everything, Gay.

 

Things Endure

Things endure
then they explode

here where our hands
are so busy working
in the round room.

In the basement
the child waits,
worn out beneath the bare lightbulb
that barely breaks the black

alone where no one
has heard,
as her wells of eyes look
for light past the screen

into the big dark.

June 2011

Posted for   Friday Flash 55   at the G-Man's

What We Bring

photo by  Andy Ilachinski

What We Bring

The human

bit by the seawind, bleeding warmth

stands on the bleach-grey beach,

walks the line of detritus and empty shells

discarded by the tide

sees the void in her heart magnified

in drops of salt coating the kelp strands

across acres of bleak and endless grey

nothing

and wonders

how the planet’s birthing table

can be so cold

and empty.

The oysters, the clams, the fishes and mussels

the gulls, the algae and plankton by gallons

meanwhile

eat and mate and die and are born,

borne on the same rocking table

living as easy in the shine and the silver,

the liquid cold and wrapping black

as in tomorrow’s

hot red sun.

November 2010

Written for One Shoot Sunday Picture Prompt at One Stop Poetry, 11/7/10