Ouroboros

Ouroboros

The girl who grew old

in her sleep keeps her eyes

on a chain, afraid to let them loose

from the fingerwork of dreams,

stringing the beads of her sanity.

The machinery must turn, not

roam across every face

of cruelty, of beauty, that

comes now in the crowd

whose Fahrenheit flies

towards the boiling heart of the sun.

Voices with stones, medicine hands

 on eyes seared blind in acid clouds;

gunshot, brickbat and burning

sweep our shuddering house.

Tiny assassins make up

the bed where we fear to lie down

with our dusty farewells.

The crone bleeds hidden

gold watering her marigolds,

sees again in the glinting blue stream

 the great ouroboros return; 

Jörmungandr opens his mouth

to lash his tail and break oceans.

Now is the time for devouring 

 as Fenris howls

for the gods to come out and die.

June 2020

posted for The Sunday Muse

and Kerry O'Connor's Skylover Word List

Process note: "In Norse mythology, Jörmungandr.. is a sea serpent, the middle child of the giantess Angrboða and Loki. According to the Prose Edda, Odin took Loki's three children by Angrboða—the wolf Fenrir, Hel, and Jörmungandr—and tossed Jörmungandr into the great ocean that encircles Midgard[our human world.]The serpent grew so large that it was able to surround the earth and grasp its own tail. .. When it releases its tail, Ragnarök [the last destroying battle of the old world, translated as Twilight or Doom of the Gods] will begin.  Jörmungandr is an example of an ouroboros,...an ancient symbol depicting a serpent or dragon eating its own tail..The ouroboros is often interpreted as a symbol for eternal cyclic renewal or a cycle of life, death, and rebirth..." ~wikipedia, condensed.

Images: Title unknown, by Alexandra Dillon  Fair Use

Alchemical drawing of an ouroboros by Theodorus Pelecanos, 1478  Public Domain

Storm Rocket

Storm Rocket

The big storm comes, rattles

the latch of night, batters twilight

with its troll voice and god hands,

throws soil from a thousand raped fields

at my face, dry earth's stripped debris,

melted smell of dirt-charged void

electric as the ghost of your lips in the dark.

I'd wear it like a rocket, follow it, fly with it

to that other land where wheat sings to

the living earth, lightning is a dreamer's

 dance and storms sigh down

a cobweb of emerald rain;

but seventy years of hot wind

have made me small as dust,

a pygmy trapped in

this unbreakable

walnut-shell

of pain.

May 2020

posted for The Sunday Muse

Images: Sky in Saskatchewan, author unknown, via internet  Fair Use

Rocket, by Brad Phillips   Fair Use

Friday Flash 55 for May 2020

Welcome all to this month's edition of the Friday 55. 

 The rules are unchanged; write a poem, piece of prose poetry or flash fiction on any subject, in exactly 55 words, no more, no less. Paste your link in the comments section, and I will be by to read what you have come up with.

The prompt will be live

from Thursday at midnight to Sunday at 4 PM.

~*~

Here's my 55:

Black Dog


The moon stopped talking

when you came

walking through catastrophes,

black dog that wouldn't mind

at your heel.

You couldn't stay;

I never stayed myself.

They thought they knew our best

but best's a savor
saved

for shot-silk touch

the war of wills

the game without rules;

reserved 

for those who meet breathing

and leave singing.

May 2020

Images: The Dog, 1819,  © Francisco Goya    Public Domain

Self portrait with a Black Dog, 1841,  © Gustave Corbet (manipulated) Public Domain

The Bird Alchemist

The Bird Alchemist

The Bird Alchemist 

was small and hero blue,

a most consummate

mountaineer of treetops,

aficionado of the woven twig,

knight-errant of the whipping wind,

fetching his lady favors

of jumping bug and thistledown

in the aquarelle skyscape

of implacable spring.

The Bird Alchemist

was more than his mask,

a Renaissance Bird of arts

and sciences, bearing the commerce

of reproduction for the rippling

sake of his mate's feathered belly

while nocturnal vigils teased him

with the secrets of all things; aloof

in his cypress lab, rocking spellbound

before creation's daft flicker, til

victorious he rose each dawn,

worms transmuted into song.

May 2020

posted for 

Kerry O'Connor's

Skylover Word List for May

and for earthweal's

Open Link

(exploring Monday's theme 

of  the hero quest)

even tho earthweal is one of several word press sites that think I am spam

Note: Aquarelle is a style of painting using thin, typically transparent watercolors, traditionally created by applying each color thru a separate stencil, now more loosely used for the style in general.

Images : Creation of the Birds, © Remedios Varo      Fair Use

Aquarelle Landscape With Bird, © Anna Svennson on Instagram  Fair Use

Camellia

Camellia

"...And a breath of lemon filled the vast moment/as the wind became a flower of gauze..."

~from Nocturnes from the Window, by Federico Garcia Lorca

I am behind the wall now

wearing red and a window.

I will be safe

if you see through me

only white sky, the almond tree

and grass.

I wore the mask til blood

stained through

the sting of a flower; it

told too much with its 

sibilant drip. That 

was not safe.

I am a camellia from

snow country, cut

at the stem, dying in aqua vitae,

a fragrance passing citrus

through your room. I will be safe

when the last petals

cover my cast off mask.

May 2020

posted for The Sunday Muse

I have also used several words from Kerry O'Connor's

Skylover Word List For May

Images: A Distant Future, © Raluca Caragea   Fair Use

Yellow Roses in a Vase, 1882, by Gustave Caillebotte, manipulated    Public Domain