Raven Dream

Raven Dream

Raven reels in raucous black for the sundown sky

before I dream my crippled dog is somehow young,

can run, that love poured out in sand grows palms

and fish, that slickened cogs grating off the true

can still be grasped and purpose given back. 

I sleepwalk down to the druid's obsidian wood. An

earth-glass pool's a window for that other wind

of pomegranate and pine ruffling yellowed lace;

by a twist of shattered light it reflects a smile

I knew in another time another place.

Raven swells in circled sky on lintel'd wings

pulling a wire on which we both are hung,

glass beads that slide together whole and touch.

The ring of our collision in midair

is unmakeable by one but not for both.

~July 2016

posted for      real toads

 Challenge:Words Count with Mama Zen

(which I have failed miserably--this being a little over twice her required word count--sorry)

Image: Big Raven, 1931 by Emily Carr, pubic domain, manipulated

Housefire

Housefire

I can't claim to know who designed

the remodeling of your mind, 

put the hauntings in the hall, or cobwebbed

the cubbyhole where the guilt bath's a-slosh

with soggy contrition, who made sure

each locked room was robbed; 

there's no comforting logic

leaking from a night-light's glow

after the red curse. 

No I know nothing 

but what you show to the street

or the mob in the alley by the hanging tree:

the work you left out from the architect's sketch,

hate's arsonist hand, the colors gone mad

in flames through the roof,

and after the fire:

larkspur in the ash where light falls oblique

on dead bricks and char, on skeletal feet.

~July 2016

posted for    real toads

Weekend Challenge:

(18 lines plumbing the depths of a shallow metaphor)

Fire Dance, 1891, by Paul Gauguin, public domain, manipulated

Internet cartoon, author unknown.

Glow

Glow

Ruby glow of a living heart,

light bleeding oceans in the dark,

me hellfire low and hot as spark,

proud of Cain's jagged mark

for all the murder left behind--

never you but just the glow

how I wished that it was mine--

how I tried to call it close

from the place where it was lost.

How you loved to make me scream.

I told no one ever then;

people hate to hear your dreams.

Such things all pass to cold

and in the dark I see no glow

around the pixelled ending fuzz.

There's no crying need to chase 

for the thing that lays me waste,  for

filaments of  was, for rubies in the maze.

No, it's the pushing, tedious circuit

nagging, whining me to work it

that's relentlessly replaced it;

and my pleasure is to shirk it.

My secret's not to face it,

to flinch, to hide in smoke,

faded sequins and repose

till it slips away undone

till someone else must take it up--

but so seldom shirking works,

and secret loves despited

go mostly unrequited.

~July 2016

 posted for     real toads

Challenge:Fireblossom Friday

Images: A warmth, A lightness, A glow, and then, 1968 by Sam Gilliam

Fair use via wikiart.org

The Nap, 1877, by Gustave Caillebotte

Public domain via wikiart.org

Empires' Sum

Empires' Sum

Chantilly's lace of words

adorned a million men

with war's black bands. After July

she got no letters from the front; even

the green calligraphy of trees was mute

foddering the feast of fire and gun;

just a telegram to say they both would know

how the moon delivers a thousand nights of snow.

~July 2016

posted for         real toads

Flash Fiction 55 Plus

Notes: per wikipedia: The Battle of the Somme ...was a battle of the First World War fought by the armies of the British and French empires against the German Empire. It took place between 1 July and 18 November 1916 ... It was the largest battle of the First World War on the Western Front; more than one million men were wounded or killed, making it one of the bloodiest battles in human history.

The French and British had committed themselves to an offensive on the Somme during Allied discussions at Chantilly, Oise, in December 1915

Images: public domain via wikimedia commons:

Somme, showing field kitchen [from an album of World War One-related photographs of William Okell Holden Dodds. Brigadier General of  the Canadian Expeditionary Force in 1914]

An abandoned German trench [in Delville Wood near Longueval, Somme, France during the Battle of the Somme, from the British Imperial War Museum collection, manipulated.]