Open Letter To A Sun

Open Letter To A Sun

You were so willing

to shine like hell

to use me up like gravity

to be the sun

that pulled my face to follow  it

twisting, beaming while parching

then gone into darkness.

I learned

the bitterness of baked sunflowers

in a land of drought.

Now I'm hardpan clay--

 but still

I miss the dance.

 ~February 2013

55 drooping petals for  the g-man

and 

 for Kerry's Wednesday Challenge at real toads

an Open Letter of sorts

Found this clip of an old album which has some ...interesting music and poetry reading, including Swinbourne and a poem of William Blake's called Ah Sunflower, which starts at 2:01--caveat, this is not for everybody and contains adult material, as well as a lot of off-key notes,so if you go straight to 2:01, you'll miss everything but the silly version of the poem(though I like the songs before and after a lot, personally:

Hover mouse for attribution on top photo, or click to go to the photographer's page at flick'r Creative Commons.
Bottom image: Still Life with Four Sunflowers, Vincent Van Gogh, 1887
Public domain via wikipaintings.org

The Hell Tithe

The Hell Tithe

A Ballad

And if any gaze on our rushing band,
We come between him and the deed of his hand,
We come between him and the hope of his heart.
The host is rushing 'twixt night and day,
And where is there hope or deed as fair?

~The Hosting of the Sidhe, W.B. Yeats 

It was a night midwinter blue

when never a stick did bloom

that the twin-horned Huntsman came to earth

for the maid beneath the moon.

The wind blew a horn as cold as grief

for a tale too lost to tell.

His hounds bayed twice in rain-dead sky,

come for the tithe to Hell.

"You've unbound your nightblack hair,

the marble's in your cheek.

Your eyes are blue as columbines;

your breast is soft as cake.

Your path is clouds, your path is wind,

your touch is the color of air.

Your mother owns the middle way,

but your father never walked there.

His folk have forever under the hill

and the dance in the moonmad dell.

His folk have life because this night

they pay the tithe to Hell.

I do not fetch the canting fool,

I do not call the mistake.

I come to take the green glass heart

that earth will only break."

She raised the light of her flower face;

he sprung to his deathwhite horse,

and never more she saw this earth

who rode on the Wild Hunt's course.

~February 2013

posted for   dVerse poets

Process Notes: Teind is a Scots word for tithe, in particular the 'hell tithe' which the faeries must pay the devil (one of the many traditional leaders of the Wild Hunt) for their longevity: one of their own kind every seven years.

Optional Musical Accompaniment:

Header Image: Cuirassier, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec 1881

Footer Image: The Sonambulist, John Everett Millrais 1871

Public domain

Papier-mâché

by DvoraV

Papier-mâché

It started the other day

and dripped over tomorrow

from the bottomless bottle:

the syrup of Sanctimony,

the wine of Denial

the milk of Monotony

the sweet juice  of Ego,

seeping. Tomorrow's edges

curled in the damp and melted away,

 papier-mâché pulp-shaped to another day.

Stark karma they say, or the wages of sin,

the white worm within; where everything's

stolen,  having nothing is earned. So drink

by all means--drink again, but leave me dry.

~February 2013

 

© Isadora Gruye

posted for   real toads

Sunday Mini-Challenge: 14 Liners

Isadora Gruye of The Nice Cage blog lends her striking photographs to Kerry O'Connor 's  challenge: 14 line poems, sonnets or otherwise. This is an otherwise, but I include a previously written and flawed sonnet , massively REwritten for this challenge (and for fun.) 

Thanks, ladies, for getting me to finally clean up this one:

New Year's Sonnet

Will New Year bring a pair of secateurs

to deadhead all my wild-seed elflock flowers,

unfinished blooms of rainbow, these my fleurs
du mal et de bonheur in columned hours

tossed into a loathesome braided trug

of blades, composted in forgetting dryrot heat,

or bring a plague of wasps to buzz in my mug

so each sip's a sting to a thirst long incomplete?

But I dream he comes, his arms full up with days

his pale star hands seed-scattering in the skies;

with a quirk and puff of dawn’s seducing ways

to bring the wine of a kiss without goodbyes,

a song on the moon, a sigh you can’t conceal

that opens the flower, feeds and makes it real.

~December 2011

Ice

Ice

I dreamed a life where being was enough,

where the past was only compost-covered snow

hard frozen but remote and not renewed,

saw verdant in the end a green sheathed globe

with a cold that didn't matter at the core.

But dreams dissolve, while winter has a way

of building ice that overtakes the clay.

~February 2013

55 icicles for    the g-man

Hover mouse for image attributions or click picture to go to photographer's page at flick'r Creative Commons