Oh Stars

Oh Stars

Faint sunshine

speckles the frosted

piles of slag

like colonnades of crumbling

carbon dust that line

the missing mile.
The great steel drag,

the rusting teeth and feral smile

have carved the lime

we delvers bring

to all our latter works

of cancelled spring.

The bites of life

we take regurgitate

some foolish tinsel'd

fail of poisoned joy

while in the east the

crescent shrinks to silver

sparks, night hangs the

spinning seethe of stars

our blind eyes block;

our smallness and our deathtoys mocked

by a brooding hatch of dark

and limitless shock.

Oh stars--gods'

eyes that laser out 

our fool's disguise;

what an underworld we make to hide our lies.

What curses can you break to turn us wise

when you come laughing 

on the wail of a newborn wind

so the wide green world can fill its graves

and breathe again?

~February 2020 

posted for  A Skylover's Word List by Kerry O'Connor

and for earthweal's 

Renewal

The images above are ©AP/Charlie Riedel, from this article: 

The Oklahoma town that produced most of WWI’s bullets is now a poison graveyard

"The chalky hills were a kind of town gathering point. The people of Picher, Oklahoma regularly picnicked there and rode bikes. Sometimes they carted the dust away and mixed it with cement to fill their driveways. Some parents added it to their children’s sand boxes. When a breeze picked up, it whipped clouds of the fine sediment through the air....For almost a century, town residents had no idea the dust was poison...

Around the turn of the 20th century, miners discovered Picher’s subsurface stores of lead and zinc. As America entered World War I, demand soared for lead to make ammunition, and Picher became one of the biggest hubs in the region’s tri-state mining district, an area between southeast Kansas to southwest Missouri. Roughly 75 percent of the American bullets and bombshells used in the two World Wars were made from this area’s metals; half came from Picher alone. At its height in the 1920s — when the town’s population reached about 19,000—227 mills were processing 10 million pounds of ore per day.

Miners carved into the earth underneath Picher. The lead and zinc ore they hauled out had to be separated from the limestone and dolomite rock that surrounded it. And the remains were piled into chat mountains around town, some 300 feet high. By the time mining ceased in the late 1960s, there were 30 piles totaling 178 million tons. The local school was built in the shadow of the hills, and the high school track team trained on them....
...in 2011, the federal government sold the massively toxic waste region, known as the Tar Creek Superfund site, back to the Quapaw Indian tribe, which had been forcibly removed from their ancestral Arkansas home and relocated to northeast Oklahoma in 1818. In 2017, the EPA granted the Quapaw $4.9 million in cleanup assistance..."

Picher is an uninhabited ghost town today. Millions have been spent to clean it up, but only time and the planet itself may have the power to do that.

Tears Of The Moon

Tears Of The Moon

"La mar no tiene naranjas, ni Sevilla tiene amor..."

(The sea has no oranges, nor Seville any love...)

from Adelina de Paseo, by Federico Garcia Lorca

I.

The sea is made

from the tears of the moon.

They fall like meteorites

to build the splash of azure rivers.

They fall like rocks

the air has set on fire in

a coliseum of dust, an iron mist

burning with the blue taste of salt.

The sea is cold, incalculable

as the heart of my beloved,

changeful, infinite, self-satisfied

and blind. This is why

the moon cries. She knows she lays

her silver face for nothing

across the drenched toss of the

erasing waves. The sea

is too busy,

tonight, and every night.

II.

The sea has far to travel

to kiss the dun lips of Spain, to fondle 

Gibraltar like a primitive doll,

to curl the sand under

on the Costa del Sol,

guitaring sweet lovesongs

to women with eyes like summer figs

who walk with the chiming of rice in the wind

whose hips round as oranges

call night after night

for the men who don't come; nuns

of blue rivers, learning to understand

the tears of the moon

that drip from the lids of

an extinguished rock, while on the

ruined plains of a waterless country

an old woman reads Lorca at midnight,

with the tears of the moon on her cheeks.

~January 2020

posted for earthweal

Open Link

Images: Orange Trees on the Road to Seville, 1903 © Joaquin Sorolla Public Domain

The Font, 1930 © Salvador Dali Public Domain

 

Friday Flash Fiction 55 for January, 2020

Welcome all, to our first Friday 55
of the new year.
 

On the last Friday of every month, I will once again host the opportunity to have both a kick-ass weekend and share a poem, piece of prose poetry or short fiction on any subject; 
in fact, whatever, 
so long as it's in the form of 55 words, no more, no less. 

The prompt will be live from Friday at 12:00 AM til Sunday at 4:00 PM. 

This is an informal sort of place, so there's no Mr Linky. Just copy and paste a link to your 55 in the comments.

Here's a link to the html code for those who like to leave a short and neat one word link.

Here is my own contribution:

 Widow's Wind

One marriage that burned,

another that froze,

one dead-alive so long ago,

a breath of dream for a child to grow;

all lost in the time-storm's

 rosemary-spice,   

all holocaust

with an angel's form,

and a devil's price.

But a silence of moon,

the windowing woods,

a widowing wind,

ink's sudden flood;

these now are good.

~January 2020

The 55 is a writer's challenge in exactly 55 words, initiated years ago by Galen Hayes, and when he passed on, continued at various times by The Imaginary Garden with Real Toads, Kerry O'Connor, and by me. When I began doing this prompt in 2017, I wrote a lot about my feelings for it and for poetry blogging. If you'd like to read the background material, you'll find it here, in my Friday 55 Preamble Wanderings.  Unfortunately, the prompt will not be weekly at this time.

Images in order of appearance:  55 chevy pick up truck, via internet, manipulated, fair use

Mountain Fire,  1903, ©John Singer Sargent. Public Domain

Cottage On Fire At Night, circa 1750, ©Joseph Wright. Public Domain

 

Last Roundup

Last Roundup

Remember me when I ran with my kind,

my hooves struck the prairie like a xylophone,

kicking up bees in the cowboy rose,

grazing the weave of sweetgrass stems,

red dirt-dancing in the south wind's eye.

Then you brought your infinite calves, 

wave after wave of threadbare sheep,

mines and guns and the oil machine

to steal the grass, to suck up the land,

to push and kill til the red stones weep.

Now that you've turned the bees to wind

now that you've turned the grass to sand

now that you've turned a dancer to meat

now that I've gone 

where the dead can't ask,

only horse-ghosts run while the sweetgrass longs

for the wild tap of hooves, the mustang's song.

 ~January 2020

 for earthwheel challenge

The Animals of Climate Change

Notes:You may wonder how this is related to climate change, but almost everything impacting animals negatively today is so related in one way or another. In this case, the climate of the West and Southwest plains has been growing rapidly more arid for several decades, increasing the stress put on the land to sustain the wild horse herds, native species like elk and deer, and cattle and sheep ranching populations. The public land areas are also feeling the push for oil and gas development, as well as unregulated trophy hunting. The ones to lose in this scenario are the wild horses.

More info:  The American Mustang is a feral horse that is descended from domesticated horses brought to the Americas by the Spanish in the 15th century, and is protected under the Wild and Free Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971. Populations are "managed" by the Bureau of Land Management  who use a series of yearly round-ups and contraceptive measures plus an adoption program to keep mustang numbers down. While control of these populations is necessary to prevent over-grazing and over-population, the BLM's practices have been criticized time and again for cruelty, corruption and incompetence, while civilian animal welfare groups have relentlessly pushed to reform and control them, with mixed success. The BLM has been accused of turning a blind eye to mass "adoptions" where the horses are slaughtered for dog food, as well as for keeping large herds of animals penned up indefinitely without any plan for their fate other than eventual slaughter. 

Most recently under the Trump administration, things have swung round to the worse scenario level, as might be expected in a 'pay to play' government:

 from 2018:
 "The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) winter roundup season is upon us. The traumatic helicopter roundups that will be conducted this season are even more concerning than usual,  since every single wild horse captured is in danger of being killed or sold for slaughter.

Signaling its intent for America's wild herds, the BLM is planning to conduct numerous roundups simultaneously. The agency's increased capacity for rounding up horses endangers more lives and  proves problematic for advocacy organizations that intend to document the mass capture of mustangs from their homes on our public lands." ~American Wild Horse Campaign

from 2020:

 "The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is putting together the fiscal year 2020 roundup schedule. Once funding is approved by Congress in the fiscal 2020 debate...we may see the schedule explode to include up to 20K wild horses removed each year for the next 3-4 years. These will be the largest roundup schedules in history.

This will decimate existing populations. It is based on the severely flawed parameters of politics in the 1970’s and perpetuated through a program based on excuses and chaos ever since." ~Wild Horse Education

Photos: header © Bev Pettit, footer © Carol Walker  Fair Use

Blue Norther

Blue Norther

If I saw you now

blue-sudden as a Norther

borrowed cherokee hair gone snowy

wolfhound jaw locked against

the puzzle in your buckshot eyes

would it be as it was, hard with

love and leaving,

full of the boy who wasn't ours,

of jaguar ghosts, bankrupt sacrifice;

an emptying out, a fumbled
 passing on?

~April 2013
reposted January 2020

55 sharply falling degrees, once for the g-man,
and once more for
 earthweal Open Link

Process notes:  BLUE NORTHER:    Refers to a swift-moving cold frontal passage in the southern Great Plains, marked by a dark, blue-black sky with strong wintery winds from the northwest or north and temperatures that may drop 20°F to 30°F in a few minutes. ~weather.com





Image:Storm Front by Vicious Kitten on the now obsolete flick'r  Fair Use

Countdown to the 55

Just a reminder,  as stated earlier this month, next Friday I will be reviving the Friday 55. The 55 is a form I learned of from a great-hearted and generous man named Galen Hayes, also known as the G-Man, who in the earlier days of the blogosphere posted a writing challenge every Friday: to link a poem, piece of prose, prose poetry, or anecdote on any subject expressed in 55 words, no more, no less. He welcomed all comers, and all forms, though his own posts were usually humorous asides accompanying photos. 

 

After he passed several years ago, he handed the torch
to The Imaginary Garden poetry site, now archived, where it was continued as an alternate prompt. Then I took it up for awhile, til my personal situation made it difficult to continue, and Kerry O'Connor held the fort. Now that things are calmer here, I hope to be able to host this challenge again. 

It will appear on the last Friday of each month, starting next Friday, January 31st, beginning at 12 midnight CST, and lasting through Sunday. I invite anyone and everyone to have a fling with it (in exactly 55 words, no more, no less.) The challenge is for writers, and the form can be prose, poetry, non-fiction or fiction.

Look forward to seeing you next Friday!