Plague Sonnet

Plague Sonnet

A bite of the flea and the plague is caught;

what he sent away always came home to him.

Tho she begged for a healer, she got what she got.

With fifty snuffed candles the room stayed dim.

From a book of dead suns he read out the shade

and the scream that whimpers before it goes.

She stole new eyes but they soon were greyed

as turquoise fevered in a cold-played flow

of impossible truths, of believable lies.

He put traps in the trees, blood on the stones

with his limp blue gaze where the Kingdom dies;

there could be no bridge in a rainbow of bones,

just the smile of the mouth-pit scarring the lawn,

and one last mistake, to make a girl gone.

~May 2015

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Challenge: Bout-Rimés

Bjorn Rudberg (Bjorn Rudberg's Writings) asks us to play a game which evolves a sonnet from given end-rhymes. I have done what I could, though I am not much of a sonneteer. I had no luck with the words, 'glade'  and 'tones' so they have been altered--apologies.

Image: title & author unknown      source
No copyright infringement intended

The Love Life of Water

The Love Life Of Water

The land's an old lover

of this water,

the bold blowsy flame who

blows into town
on the back of a riot.

The land's not really sure

he wants her back,

at least so much of her,

but after a wild night

he finds her seaweed hair

on his pillow anyway,

grey eyes bloodshot with lightning

 devouring his face,

her dirty dissolving fingers

exploring every fissure.

 Everything moveable here is hers,

and she will take it;

the land knows

all about that, because

she's been this way before

too many times.

The  last kiss is roughest, the overflow

 that leaves him drowned and gasping,

with the hard morning of living coming on,

while she smiles and makes a sound
like bells exploding

and moves her mirrors, her floods,

her funnels down the road.

~May 2015

It's been raining here for forty days and fifty nights--or so it seems. 
Listening to rain hit the walls as I write.









Optional Musical Accompaniment

Image credits: Frontyard flood, copyright joyannjones 2015
Street Flooding, Oklahoma City      courtesy KFOR News source
No copyright infringement intended

Dust

Dust

(or, Things That Were)

The aurochs and the Irish Elk,

bluebuck and the red gazelle,

western black rhinoceros,
the grey atlantic whale

dodo and the thylacine,

the broad-faced potoroo,

the Puerto Rican flower bat--

ghosts in Melinoe's zoo,

dust.

Jamaican petrel, painted vulture

night heron of Ascension;

of butterflies the Xerces Blue,

and unsilvered fritillary,

the paradise birdwing 
and clouded apollo,
gone, long gone
as things got hollow--

dust.

Appalachian yellow asphodel,

the Cuban Ruta tree,

Mason River myrtle, the
pelea that bore a cross,

begonia of the wooly stalk,
Galapagos amaranth,

Saint Helena's heliotrope--

gone past harvest hope,

dust.

Your eyes, your hand,

the coiled asp that dozed

on Cleopatra's broken breast,

the crumbled temple-grave

useless as a camel hat, the bones

tipped over the rim of the world

again and again tossed in eons' ash-can,

extinguished and cured--
dust;

the warm rush, the sun-smile,

half-remembered harmonic

of a cry that isn't there, violet-blue

chambered shell in cartilage cage

beating out in grey plumes the

tender parts that once we grew
amber ripe to rusty age,
ossified to fossils now --

dust.

~May 2015

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Fireblossom Friday

The ingenious and inventive mind of  Shay Simmons (Shay's Word Garden) sends us off into the endless possibilities of lists. Mine is pretty self-explanatory.

Process notes:  All the animals, birds, butterflies and plants named here are drawn from (wikipedia's) lists of extinct species.

Melinoe was a Greek goddess of the underworld and also had characteristics of a moon goddess.  '[her] connections to Hecate and Hermes suggest that she exercised her power in the realm of the soul's passage...^.she brings night terrors to mortals by manifesting in strange forms, "now plain to the eye, now shadowy, now shining in the darkness," and can drive mortals insane'~wikipedia

Image: Megaloceros, from Lascaux cave, public domain via wikimedia commons

Horned woman, artist unknown, via the internet. No copyright infringement intended.

Mudslide

 Mudslide

Your left face

honors your right face

but neither one tells the truth;

neither one

is really here to talk,

while I watch a sky

curdled by spirit swimmers

move closer, watch

their filmy fingers

stroke its crushing weight

into sundered cyclones, kneading

the mud-faced earth.

What strangler

has pulled back the plait

of your hair so

tight across your tangled

white throat? What butcher has

chopped the rich marble

from your cheeks and left

your face so naked and still?

Past and present, you say--
they rain wild in this drench

so an equivocal future
can slide

all the easier
away.

Trussed in cords of your loss,

deaf in drums of your voice,

I knew myself beaten;

but untied--
--O, yes, freed--
I hear too much.

I am my own silence 

floating;
death's latest convert,

looking on numb.

~May 2015

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Weekend Mini-Challenge: John Donne

Karin Gustafson (ManicdDaily) offers this weekend's challenge, to write to the ringing of chimes, connect the dots of interconnection, or in some other way address Donne's telling lines about how no man is an island. This is what I got, a slap from the past, as it were. Despite the title, the mudslide mentioned is not a physical one.


We have storms heading in again this evening and my computer will be off, so I may be unable to respond or visit till, the weather gods willing, tomorrow.

Image: Sketch of Clouds with Colour Annotations, 1890, by Vincent Van Gogh. 

Public domain via wikiart.org

Danaë

My mother was a fool

to take that flower

picked and bound to die,

with but one seed to fly

from you, a seer's toy,

symbol of a dead hour

lesson of a broken school.

To be mortality's martyr

I became your towered barter,

womb pointed down

a field unfound,

a beeless meadow, I

heard above in the roll and pound

a god who was so much smarter.

On the bridge of night's black river

I wrapped hands and feet in skins

to turn the lightning of his whim,

to hold the spill from the silver krater:

mixed wine of the poet's grief,

bright rain of the god's relief,

seed of your mirrored killer.

By then it was far too late,
as we slept on the god-calmed sea,

my sword-sharp boy curled into me

till mercy washed us dry, too late

to unpick the dying flower
of your trivial collateral fate.

~May 2015

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The Tuesday Platform

Process Note: A krater  is a large vase which was used to mix wine and water in Ancient Greece.

"In Greek mythology, Danaë was a daughter of King Acrisius of Argos and his wife Queen Eurydice. She was the mother of the hero Perseus by Zeus....Disappointed by his lack of male heirs, Acrisius asked an oracle if this would change. The oracle told him that he would be killed by his daughter's son. She was childless and, meaning to keep her so, he shut her up in a bronze tower or cave. But Zeus came to her in the form of golden rain, that streamed in through the ceiling and down into her womb. Soon after, their child Perseus was born.Unwilling to provoke the wrath of the gods or the Furies by killing his offspring, Acrisius cast Danaë and Perseus into the sea in a wooden chest. The sea was calmed by Poseidon and at the request of Zeus the pair survived." ~wikipedia

Images: Danaë, 1908, by Gustav Klimt
Public domain via wikiart.org
Seeds, copyright 2013, joyannjones