Home With The Diatoms

 

 

 

 

Home With The Diatoms

 

 

When I was a child

before sleep we prayed

for love to be shown, for safety to stay,

starved children in Korea to be saved.

Then the light would go off.

I'd put my real bed

of conches and nautilus twists

under the toss of the night's waves.

Regal on the seafloor

shells poked their bubbling heads

up out of snow-sand. Aquarelle fins and

gold-grey eye-globes blinked around me,

all greeted with a princess flip

of my green-scaled tail.

Reclined with coelacanths,

eyes blueing in my head,

all my mother-cut hair grown

long as a squid's arm,

I waited to swim into sleep,

watching the shadows of

far-above gulls mottle the green ceiling,

alone yet blanketed in

life watching over me, drowsing

to the epochs' stereopticon flash.

When we met in the deluge

you called in a lost language

for that nightspell to rise, to link us,

to sink us completely

in diatoms, wave after wave,

kissing underwater, not afraid to breathe

not afraid to drown, kelp-hair

in the undertow fanned and fluttered

summoned by a sea-fire of peace

to make ashes of fear.

 

March 2022

posted for earthweal's weekly challenge:

Shelter

Process note: "..Diatoms are unicellular [microalgae]: they occur either as solitary cells or in colonies, which can take the shape of ribbons, fans, zigzags, or stars..Living diatoms make up a significant portion of the Earth's biomass: they generate about 20 to 50 percent of the oxygen produced on the planet each year,  take in over 6.7 billion metric tons of silicon each year from the waters in which they live, and constitute nearly half of the organic material found in the oceans..."~wikipedia

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: The Bright Liquid, © Edmond Dulac    Fair Use

Pink Shell With Sea Weed, 1937  © Georgia O'Keefe    Fair Use

Après La Révolution

 

 

 

 

Après La Révolution

 

 

After the revolution we

became the aristos.

 

I fell in love with a

prince of the butterscotch castle

but I could never get past

the guillotine in his head, the wolf

hissing in his flock of noise,

the glitter-ship in his bottle

waiting each day to sail him away.

 

All the devils of summer

came to our parties, flashing

their ruby eyes in the dark, stealing

my stockings, hiding the postman,

eating the silverware. I made a centerpiece

from applecores, black horns and tail-spikes

and called it art diabolique.

 

When the winter night

finally flapped its starstained carpet

over the horizon, its patterns worn

and indistinct as we were, all

the stardust beaten out of us, I knew

we wouldn't make it to the end,

or even to France.

 

La révolution est morte.

Vive la révolution.

 

 

 

March 2022

 

 

 

 

 

posted for 

Shay's Word List #17

Joni Mitchell

Images: Study for the Spanish Dance, 1879, © John Singer Sargent  Fair Use

Charlotte Corday, 1860,  ©Paul-Jacques-Aimé Baudry   Fair Use

Flowers Of The Moon

 

 

 

Flowers Of The Moon

 

 

 

The moon rocked in its cradle

hunched down on its paws

reluctant to rise

 

while the sharpened stars stared

and ice fell like blades

on the night she was born.

 

She wanted flowers,

hands to hold, a round-

bellied pony with liquid eyes

 

but they gave her knives, so

she learned to juggle.

There was plenty of work.

 

 "Stand back." she said,

"I could put out your eye easy

as breathing. I could and I might." 

The moon crept up to

the crossroads.The stars fell asleep.

The knives rose and spun

 

whirled and glittered like

blue ice flying

til one by one they fell

 

from her scarred hands.

"I've no time for this trade," she said,

"where every mistake bleeds,

 

where every hit frightens.

The moon needs a gardener

for roses to grow."

 

March 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for

The Sunday Muse

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images; Sunset at the North Pole, author unknown,     Fair Use

Girl Juggling Knives, unknown source via Sunday Muse,   Fair Use

Ave Atque Vale

 

 

 

Ave Atque Vale

 

 

 

 

Though

they make

your eyes shine

your hand reach out

not even these dreams can make you love me.

 

It's cruel time breaks like glass but crueler still

to see you smile

as if you

want me

still.

 

 

 

 

 

 

March 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for dVerse Poets: Meeting the Bar

Numbering Ten (Tetrachtys)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Hands, © Eugeny Kozhevnikov   Fair Use

Vistation, photomanipulation © joyannjones

Crows In The Snow

 

 

 

 

 

 

Crows In The Snow

 

 

In the cold, in the silenced sun,

the eye reaches out

against the blind blizzard

for the heart of the rose.

 

In the fall of a dark feather

petals unfold

shed stark on the snow

in a blackness of crows.

 

Everything glittering

 comes to their eyes

as a clamor that heals;

gold light on the ice,

 

 

black feathers for blood ink,

 rosebuds from their beaks--

all dropped at my feet,

these bones in disguise.

March 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for earthweal's

Animal Poetry

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Living antlers, artist unknown, via internet     Fair Use

Raven Steals The Sun, © Aaron Purcell     Fair Use

Cameo

 

 

 

 

 

Cameo

 

 

He knew it was all over. He was down to bit parts and baked beans, and infinite hours at the crusted table nursing shots of Old Peculiar. He was tired of the smell of dead fire, of himself, of the screams as cops kicked random drunks even more senseless outside the back door.  But she'd said to meet her here, after the curtain came down like a sickness for the last time, so he stayed til midnight, hopeful as a hundred other nights, and then walked home, no longer waiting, no longer thinking, just a papier mache lump reformed in the basin of losing it all. 

Yet that Sunday, as the wind blew streamers of wet newspaper across the moon, in the patter of the rain over his dissolving steps he heard her laughing, shockingly close in the black rippling dark, posed like Love when she dismisses her bodyguards, and carelessly makes a throwaway cameo just to keep her hand in. He'd imagined Natasha for twenty years, her compound bow lips and blackbird eyes, and here she was, if he hurried, disappearing down the street while the winos gaped, trailing her spiny excuses like porcupines, to lead him to that submarine she kept, down in the River Styx.

 

 

March 2022

 

 

 

posted for

Shay's Word List #16

Donald Barthelme

Note: I've never read Barthelme, nor do I pretend to understand post-modernism, and I really don't know where this came from as I don't normally do prose. It's a mystery.

Images: Sunday, 1926 © Edward Hopper   Fair Use

Ballarina in a Death's Head, © Salvador Dali   Fair Use

The Night Circus

 

 

 The Night Circus

 (a 55)

 

 

You told me

my eyes

were lanterns.

 

You stood them

around the bigtop

while you brushed

 

the clouds into my hair,

then on the highwire,

where you washed

 

in the moon;

but the wind came

and took their fire.

 

The night-circus burned.

 My hair flew up

in silver flames

 

of moon-twisted sun,

 

and I ran.

 

 

 March 2022

 

 

 

 

 

posted for dVerse Poets

Open Link Night

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Head in the Clouds, photomanipulation © Thomas Dodd  Fair Use

Paysage Orageux, 1901 photographer unknown  Fair Use

On The Bright Turning Page

 

 

 

 

 

On The Bright Turning Page

 (A sonnet)

 

On the bright turning page of spring's uproar

when the ferry sailed from day to dreadful night

with one upon the deck, one left on shore,

an annotation jotted down in stricken twilight,

I heard the winter laugh like truculent swans,

as white lilies bobbed their lovely idiot heads;

I saw a volume could be made of broken bonds,

the long ballad of peace sent hungry to its bed.

 

The bear brings ash upon its ailing breath

when fire flies from frightened children's hands.

When two forces clash in a quarrel to the death

no stone, no garden wall or house can stand;

 

but awash in azure sky, flowers of the sun

grow wild beneath the smell of smoke and guns.

 

 

 

 

 March, 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted  in solidarity with Ukraine

for Shay's Word List #15:

Edna St. Vincent Millay

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Note: many of Millay's poems are sonnets, and she often used the first line as her title. I've borrowed that stylistic aspect here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Lilies, © Constantin Artachino     Fair Use

Sunflower, 1965 © Georgia O'Keefe           Fair Use