Moondog

Moondog

Moondog came,

barking wither-white;

turned things dead

with his rabid spit;

a year sickened gone.

Come in now

before we all break.

Hold me hard

while the howling brings

black hearts and blooms down.

~April 2017

for Magaly's Stillborn Sprouts 

  

Note: I have not only used Magaly's challenge, but a form she has invented, called Thinner Tanka. Classic tanka(in English) consists of 5 syllable-counted lines of 5-7-5-7-7. Her variation thins this down to 3-5-3-5-5, for a very crisp framework which I probably did not do justice to. I have chained my two wobbly attempts into one poem here.

Image: Frostburn, © joyannjones, March 2017

Moon Dog, 1975, © Rufino Tamayo, Fair use via wikiart.org 

Longship

Longship

A dream that runs

like a deer in a wolfpack:

men cluster round me,

coyotes by streetlight,

streams of bright coins

pour from their mouths.

They dig  up the world-tree;

I steal it back, water its

 hole big as the moon.

It bobs like a bottle:

dead wood floating

goes to make a live longship.

~April 2017

for Flash 55 Plus

Images: Yggdrasil, Longboat with lightning, authors unknown, via google image search

Fool's Box

Fool's Box

From its box of cloud

the lightning howled

to find the trap

of the fool's grey walls,

crack'd them with a fitful fire,

rocked the cradle hard and higher.

Wild, wild, it played within

the morephemes of his box of skin;

burning hot as rain was cold,

too bright to lose, too quick to hold;

 til, sun-collapsed and blue air-bled,

it left him with a pen instead.

~April 2017

for      Brendan's Fools

(a tongue in cheek take for the theme of  April's 30/30)

Images: Untitled, © Zdizlaw Beksinski Fair use via wikiart.org