Easter 2015 AD

Easter 2015 AD

Hammered thunder sparks

on the iron sky even as

the periled world

hails fall and rise

of the compassionate Magician;

but the rocks that roll

from that tomb-door

explode,

His loving words ashed embers

in red mist;

for love proves

a broken blade in a broken hand

when the great wolf

howls down the dawn.

Kenya Attack: Three Days Of Mourning For Massacre Victims As Churches Fear Easter Violence

~April 2015



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Flash 55 Plus

Kerry hosts this months 55 Plus with the side theme of Easter. I'm afraid I have not gone the fuzzy bunny and colored eggs route.

Process Notes: The 'great wolf,' might be Fenrir, slayer of Odin, who appears in the time of  Ragnarök. Or he might simply be ourselves.

Image: Wolf Howl, via google image search, author unknown.

No copyright infringement intended.

Neurasthenia

Neurasthenia

It's hard

to climb out of a painted grave

ochre on your palms,

pearls collapsed at your feet

fear in your arms

trapped in a box

with two many sides

flimsy, unsafe, yet much too tight

each wall a blind face of reason denied

drawn to a puzzle

for the sake of the wit--

break all the pieces,

then say you've solved it--

while a thready voice

goes on and on;

the more it belts out the story,

the madder its gone.


~April 2015






Posted for

National Poetry Month with Magaly Guerrero

Challenge: Feeling So Deeply It Hurts
Today Magaly's prompt is to exlore the confluence of pain and emotion, or as she says more clearly:
"With this poem, show how an emotion might increase physical pain, and vice versa."

Process note: neurasthenia: noun, dated : 1. an ill-defined medical condition characterized by lassitude, fatigue, headache, and irritability, associated chiefly with emotional disturbance.
~via google




Image: Dora Maar, 1936, by Man Ray
Fair use via wikipaintings.org

The Ravensong

The Ravensong

A warrior sings his death song:

'We struck with our swords.

I saw a host that morning

bow before the blade's edge...'

When his life completes, a man sings

the ravensong; he tells of his deeds,

enemies dead at his feet,

beasts brought to their knees.

'We struck with our swords.

the slain lay athwart one another

the spear-clash's cuckoo [the raven]

was cheered...'

At days' end, an old woman

sings her tale of ripe womb-apples

each more a battle than the wolf

at the throat, the axe-arc, the sword swing.

A woman sings her death song:

'In blood I brought forth,
at breast I nursed them on

and some yet stand to take me home.'

Can there be no other tune
to the ravensong then; only birth

and death under sun or moon,
for when the end comes?

'We struck with our swords;

it wasn't like a warm bath...

I saw the battle-moon burst

broken were the lives of men...'

'We struck with our swords

so it then was destined...' but what

of the one who sings of the day

the soil broke for the hand-rake

how the black earth was bent,

for the far-furrowed seeds
with unwavering intent

not to bear grain but only feed bees,

how nothing was slain, nothing was made

but color and scent, how a hand,
stretching, was put on the wind,

and it covered the land.

'We struck with our swords

So long ago it was...

[If] hope of life is lost now

laughing shall I die."

~April 2015




If you would like to hear the poem read by the author, please click below:


 

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Challenge: Fireblossom Friday

Shay (the Word Garden) wants us to write a song lyric today. Because she knows me well, she has given me personal permission to go back a few dozen centuries, and even stipulated that I could include Vikings, and severed heads if necessary. Taking great liberties with sequence, I have chosen to present excerpts of a very ancient poem, called Krákumál, which is written in ten line stanzas in a particularly tricky skaldic form, which I have not tried to reproduce, using a more traditional English form, the ballad, as my base, though I have mostly replaced the traditional ABCB rhyme with just meter and slant rhyme.  Krákumál was almost certainly meant to be recited  or sung as a sort of chant, or lyric, so hopefully between the skald's words and mine, I have met the challenge.
 More info below.

Process notes: Words in italics are from Krákumál, translation, Ben Waggoner. The phrase 'the spear-clash's cuckoo' is a skaldic poetic device known as a kenning, where an obscure but descriptive set of words is used in place of a more common term. In this same fashion, 'the battle-moon' refers to a shield, and I intend 'ripe womb-apples' to mean grown children.

Krákumál or the Song of the Crow ( in Old Norse: kråka= Crow) concerns events in 9th century Scandanavia and the British Isles, but dates in its first found instance to around 1230. It ' is an example of a "life-poem" (aevikvida)...in which the speaker reviews the deeds of his life, often as he is dying...similar poems exist in other early...languages, such as Beowulf's death speech in Beowulf. Krákumál may have been composed in Orkney or Scotland...the style is similar to known skalds [there]..." ~Waggoner, The Sagas of Ragnar Lodbrok

Images: all rights reserved by, copyright and  courtesy of  Silvan-Massa at Deviant Art, reproduced without any modifications.

Bitter Cold

Bitter Cold

Even in the bitterest cold

your body snakes itself

away from mine

to make its own wallow

shivering but uncrowded,

so that in this stranger's chair

in the decembered black,

I have only a thin sheet of paper 

for warmth,

and you 

a rucked bed, too strait

for touching.

The cold is so big

it chills fresh-boiled coffee 

in the cup,

stiffens each bone it meets

with the old ache. Yet here

in its stone room

I am warmer
than tight in a futile quilt

for this paper I burn,

set on fire

with a script of bright flames,
giving

the wink of a true eye

the stroke of a seeing hand
opening

the buried door that leads

 to the summer country

and every song

as you bear winter alone,

deaf in the slack tide

of your darkening sleep.

~Dec 2014, 

revisions April, 2015

posted for

 National Poetry Month with Magaly Guerrero

Day 2 Challenge: Creativity and Pain

Magaly is generously throwing her blog and her creativity into the ring for this year's April insanity, and providing a prompt a day to help us along. Today she asks us to : "explore creativity as a healing salve, as a shield, as a weapon, or as a negotiation method to use when dealing with physical and/or psychological pain"

Process notes: "The moment that the tidal current ceases is called slack water or slack tide. The tide then reverses direction and is said to be turning.."~wikipedia

Images: Cabin Interior, ©joyannjones 2014

Footer: Summer Bedroom, by Jacob Yanek, Fair use via wikipaintings.org

22,000 Square Miles

22,000 Square Miles

The lake and I had

an understanding; I gave her

seeds and roots, the stranded dead, rocks,

and the things that are broken by rocks

and she would dissolve me

off that poisoned shore, re-

place me, suspend me, teach

the words

to her lullaby waves, croon-

curled by a mother's hand,
each replicant stroked singular
from the fleeing horizon,

forever a promise.
I had her mutable

possessing sky

wind for a towel, a piano,

a  thick book of tales

written in lettering twisted invisible,

drawing the silence of dusk and dawn,

star, sun and moon

so I would know its name.

There where wet air 

whisked whispering to peaks

white as cream--beaten, soft

yet standing, standing--

where light and shadow painted

their example,

though I was not water, to live with her

ninety-nine years, though I could not 

foam twenty-two thousand miles,

I had my time of knowing

what to do.

I learned all my imperatives

and then I flew.

~April 2015

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Challenge: What Sparked Your Poetic Heart
The buoyant and gifted Magaly Guerrero asks us to tell of a poet or work of art that set us on our poetic road--I have written that poem already a few times ( Caryatid, The Farewell Book) so I chose to show another departure point, how finding the power of something not made by man influenced me, and in fact, saved me.

Process notes: Lake Michigan has a surface area of approximately 22,300  square miles . The residence time of its water, ie mean time the water spends in any particular lake, is 99 years. For more information on the lake I grew up with, see wikipedia

Photo: Lake Michigan -Waves Off Zion, by Andrea Jaeger Miehls, Source