Harem Dance

Harem Dance

The harem girls dance

in turn, daily nightly

evanescent bubbles in the hookah

of his pleasure.

They serve their finest dishes; tender

quails trembling with ginseng, coriander buns

redolent of cinnamon, to tempt

his failing appetite.

Each day brings another exhibition

trapped satellites of a heavy sun

turning only the loveliest warm face

outward under his needle gaze

but behind hides the cold hemisphere

of darkness, pitted waste of light's

rejection. He ponders the pale moon

breasts of the new one from Tangiers.

In the tamarisk each night

whichever one performs

the blue nightjar snaps moths and sings

straight through to the dagger dawn.

March 2012

 Posted for    real toads

Challenge: Poem Sketching

Ella asked us to 'sketch' out a poem from a short list of words as a writing exercise, as promoted by poet and teacher Sandford Lyne. I used my own list of these four words below:

evanescent

satellite

coriander

needle

Image: The Harem Dance, by Giulio Rosati 

oil on canvas, Public domain via wikimedia commons

All The Ruby Words

All the Ruby Words

By now the words have surely all been said,

composed with a thousand pens from a thousand heads

and yet I wring out more each midnight, sweet

as lemon curded tarts, or bitter as dread.

Our palindromic thoughts tend to repeat

like nightmares of the same reversing street.       

The dead all come to cut the living wrist

and fill the graveyards with their long retreat;

but kisses, no they haven’t all been kissed

nor whispers of ruby words lost in synthesis.

And so my love, I hope you'll overlook    

redundancy and settle for the gist.

There's no beginning nor an end to what we wrote--

it sparkles still, this ruby at your throat.

November 2011

A rubaiyat plus two for the   Sunday Mini-Challenge  at  Real Toads 

(with apologies to Omar Khayyam for the irresistible pun)

  As usual, in my lazy way on Sundays, I've taken a longer free verse piece which I felt was not quite ready for prime time, and honed it with Kerry's form suggestion. I include it for reference, and just for fun:

All the Words

All the words surely have been

said by now

from a thousand pens,

from a million tongues,

and yet I wring out more and more

here in the long midnight, sweet

as lavender and water or

bitter as salted vinegar

from the same worn rag.

And all the thoughts

surely men, surely women

have thought them all before,

and more than I can

ever think, filling the wide world

with the long knit of the mind

and yet I unravel and tangle them

over and over, these same tired threads.

But the kisses, no,

they haven’t all been kissed,

and the soft birdcalls of lovewords

in the dark, have no ending

as they had no beginning

and so I’ll stick to those, my love

and you won’t mind if

sometimes

I repeat myself.

October 2011

Image: Ruby by ~NaeturVindur on deviantArt