Last Light

 

 

 

Last Light

 

 

"All changed, changed utterly:   

A terrible beauty is born..." ~W. B. Yeats 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was born

in the black and white,

a changed place still living what had been,

a winter child in a fossil's spring of

sun and shadow, war's unmercied clarity

and the trampled mud of peace,

 

its empty whiskey bottles

and gardens of shaded violets, deep

black soil, black thunderclouds, 

white winter sky, blackened medals,

white gauze veils packed away 

in crackled trunks.

 

Now I live my last in a red dirt country

where the heat-song of September changing

dips the fading wheat in ginger honey. Wind-weary

trees lace still-green leaves thru the soft

reaching fingers of clouds, holding tight

before their scarlet fall.

 

Earth is whispering her love words

in the rustle of sundried grass

and blackberries tumbling over with

thickets of banquets in seedy puzzles.

When I turn to face the setting citrine sun

it's you I call to the open door

 

to sit beside me in the shortening days

drunk with bees and crow-call,

rich with the gatherings of every flower.

Won't you come, beloved,

before January rimes the windows

with its deep blue loss. 

 

Come to the place 

where you can't be forgotten.

Bring your cinnamon september skin

and your wild silver-grass hair to these ruins,

and your campfire eyes,

alight in the night of dreams so far

 

beyond the black and white.

Lace your fingers with mine

as trees do with the sky,

separate and one

where the fire of what was

in the hope of what may never be

 

is the only light left

before the scarlet fall.

October 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted for earthweal's

Lyre For A Changing Earth

 

 

 

 

 

With thanks to Brendan for the poetry of W.S Merwin and others which inspired this. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: My mother with myself at 2 months of age, Evanston, Illinois March 7th, 1949 

House North of Nash, Oklahoma, 2022  photo © Terry Wassan   via internet   Fair Use

Fairy Tale

 

 

 Fairy Tale

Princess Moonzumi and Prince Heart-of-Ash

were betrothed as children through a looking glass.

She never knew him. He never saw her,

just a shadow that moved in the mirror's blur.

Prince Heart-of-Ash learned bard song and sword,

to jest with a blade and kill with a word.

Princess Moonzumi went out every day

to dance with the Sidhe where the dogwoggles play

 

down in the mud, up in the scud,

around the green tree that sheds no blood.

She knew every fae in the wild dark wood

and they taught her to fear the evil in good.

 

Princess Moonzumi and Prince Heart-of-Ash

were married in autumn when the east winds thrash

as the leaves fell like fire on earth's mirror-face,

and they loved each other for a year and a day.

 

Then Prince Heart-of-Ash took his sharp bright blade

down to the wood where the dogwoggles played.

The princess died like a mouse in the leaves

for a lie in the heart only ash could believe.

 

 

September 2022

posted for earthweal's

Ekphrasis Earth

 

 

 

and 

 

 

 

dVerse Poets'

Poetics: The Good and the Evil

Sidhe/SHē/noun, plural noun: Sidhe: the fairy people of Irish folklore, said to live beneath the hills and often identified as the remnant of the ancient Tuatha Dé Danann.

Note: I wrote the seed of this poem while running a fever a few weeks ago, but the prompts shaped it to final form. Apologies if I have stretched the boundaries a bit on what was requested.

 

 

Images: Mammal in Leaves, author unknown, courtesy of earthweal   Fair Use

They went hand in hand in the country that smells of appleblossoms and honey,  © Arthur Rackham, Irish Fairy Tales

 Fair Use

The Scarecrow's Sister

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Scarecrow's Sister

(a 55)

 

 

The scarecrow's sister

feels the breath of November

scans the valentine of Winter

sees her brother surrender

his Eden again to Martinmas weather,

mocked in a cornfield

crestfallen with crows.

Tho his overcoat's empty

as her sentimental replay

of Romeo reborn,

she knows Spring will raise him

high on his stick

alive in the corn.

September, 2022

posted for

Word Garden Word List

and

earthweal's 

Open Link # 137

Images: In The Fields, Evening  © Jules Breton circa 1900   Public Domain

Pumpkinhead--Self Portrait © Jamie Wyeth, 1972  Fair Use

Lonely As A Dream

 

 

 

 

 

Lonely As A Dream

 

"Everything's a dream when you're alone."

~Wes Craven

 

 

If

you come through the door 

you see at once it's an old woman's house

smelling of apples, eucalyptus

and yellow books rhyming by size.

Nothing is new.

 

Incense

burns in the bedroom

for the sake of a man's memory

smoking and braiding in soft light

that slips through heavy drapes

like a thief. There is silence.

 

Peace

is there, and emptiness.

The ghost has learned to

keep to its corner, and seldom speaks to

the woman who gambles with words

in the hunger before dawn. 

She's

 the laugh no one hears

at  the midnight carnival,

the road no one takes

winding back on itself, the sprout 

light's pulled too thin, too tall

in its mirror, shadow.

Besides 

the dream, she knows only 

a sky flat with heat

that eats birds and rain,

a plague without cure

that stretches its dead skin

to infinity.

But 

everything passes. To all things come

this tension of maximums

just before the breaking

and the letting go.

 

 

 September 2022

posted for

Word Garden Word List

and earthweal's

Open Link #134

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Doorway © Suzanne Moxhay, All Rights Reserved   Fair Use

Dangerous Laisons, 1926,  © Rene Magritte  Fair Use

 

 

The Feather Seed

 

 

 

 

 The Feather Seed

(a 55)

There was a feather;

it grew from my eye until

it was my eye.

There was a word.

It grew from my quill until

it was a wing.

There was a seed;

it grew from the soil of

every word decaying, until

it was a tree where 

quilled birds sang

like candles in the dark.

August 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for 

The Sunday Muse

hosted by Carrie Thackery Van Horn

and 

 

 

Sherry Marr's 

Rewilding challenge at earthweal

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At The Hospital

 

 

 

 

 At The Hospital

 

 

Pendants of light

reflections reversed

bent on slick white tile

random voices

in chained rooms

living out their untold

fortunes. Are fortunes told

or are they read,

written in a book of days

all numbered

not visible except

through curving crystal?

Or are they droned

the same tune every time

inside the skull,

mortality's earworms?

I am indifferent.

The gypsy broke my cup;

my tea leaves spilled.

 

 

 

 

circa 2019, rev. March 2022 

posted for earthweal's

Open Link #131

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Sun In An Empty Room, 1963, © Edward Hopper   Fair Use

The Fortune Teller, 1933, © Brassai            Fair Use 

Firefall

 

 

 

 

Firefall

 

 

 Lightning falls tonight

along the border of change.

Summer made a brass mirror

hot as Hell's floor to flare

the prairie grass to fire. 

Now her demon child

walks the storm.

We built a tall white tower

a colossus to catch the wind

for us to eat. With a flick of

staggered shot the lightning felled it

melting it

like an interrupted dream.

And so it was

when you and I

met to hold the lightning

in our palms, flaring in

a mutual fire, to give back

the reflection of love

from eyes of brass. Too much

heat cracks the shell.

Too much

of the electric touch

and towers melt,

lightning falls singing

a crackling song that says:

no one can own me

only the end I bring them.

 

 

August 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for earthweal's weekly challenge:

Lightning Falls 

 

 (with apologies to Brendon 

for shamelessly using his theme title)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note: Last night we got one of those wild storms that pop up along an advancing front. Most of it missed us here at my location, saving some very welcome thunder and rain, but parts of the state got flooding downpours, downburst winds up to 75 mph, and a lot of lightning, a bolt of which melted this wind turbine in Custer County and set it on fire.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Volcano and lightning, author unknown, via the internet. Fair Use

Burning Wind Turbine, Custer County, courtesy of Oklahoma News 9 Weather, Fair Use 

August in America 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

August in America 2022

 

 

August is

a box of eyes

closed

pretending there is no

stab of light

a beach of scalded feet

of knees scraped raw on underwater sand

bleeding a string of dead flowers

and too many ants.

May sang once I remember

November wailed but August

holds a hot hand

over summer's mouth stifling sweat-damp

nights of thirst with silent fever 

like a rash

of rumors

 hallucinations of

drowning rain.

No one wants August

to do anything but leave

even if it means red winter

but it stays

only peeling like old paint

spreading like the sour smell

of smoke

in a burned house

backbuilt from blood and sickness

where even the ants

die by fire.

 

 

August 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for dVerse Poets Poetics:

Sometimes August isn't Recognized

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: The Enchanted Beach, 1950 © Salvador Dali   Fair Use

Ants © Dunja Zubak via satchiart.com   All Rights Reserved   Fair Use

Eyes Of A Sailor

 

 

 

 

 

Eyes Of A Sailor

(a 55)

 

 My eyes grow rheumy

swimming in moonblur

but witnessing still

light's cut, color's fill,

shadow's indigo blot.

Light the blade, color the cloth,

blue shadow stitching together what's lost.

Old cells' ramparts

falling unfixed; 

wind pulls their dust,

time washes waves

over mitochondrial graves,

but memory sails its unsinkable boat

holding afloat

my far-sighted ghost.

 

 

July 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for earthweal's

Open Link #129

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: The Boatman, and Boat of the Mermaid, © Sabin Balasa  Fair Use

Flambeau

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Flambeau

(a quadrille)

 

 

I don't want to write poems

fiddle while Rome's monde nouveau

becomes a flambeau.

They're a medicine-show elixir

a too-loose wrapping

on a fountaining vein.

 

But I have nothing else

as Arcadia burns

but this glittering salt

to seed rain

on a grassfire wind.

 

 

 July 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for earthweal's

Sacred Glimmers

 

 

 

and

 

 

 

dVerse Poets

Quadrille #156

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Arcadia is a region in Greece, historically designated as the home of the god Pan, and synonymous with an unspoiled, pastoral wilderness. (Many towns across the world have been named after this spot, usually--tho not intentionally--ironically. I live not far from Arcadia, Oklahoma, a self-conscious tourist trap on Route 66 near an eponymous manmade lake. So far, it has not burned down.)

 

 

 

Images: Torch, 2008, © Wu Guanzhong    Fair Use

Media photo of grassfire, Beaver County, Oklahoma 2022   via internet  Fair Use

 

Century Song

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Century Song

For a hundred years

it seems

I've waited here, wasted here,

full of parch and motion, a salty throat

from drinking too much ocean once

though it's been

no more than a lifetime

or a breath

held under a thousand passing thrones

of aqua-green

where I counted days as quicksilver fish,

as coral bones, marked each dagger flashed in

 mouths of sharks, each scale, each whale

singing to all her kin while I

I drowned alone.

 

For a century

it seems

I trod this water milling, to breathe the years I knew

still held the spark, 

the flowers' poppy dream, the moths unflamed,

the coyote's bark

longing for the moongleam

on your reaching arms.

 

For a century

or two

the heat is master; 

the dust that birthed you,

the sun that calls you on.

It blisters me as the freeze of aeons

boils a distant steam, until night's mantle

 

falls across the blaze, and in the end perhaps,

too many too-bright ghosts and burning days

earn me a last cool breeze

 

a breeze and a flashing of that dream

 

where you

come back for me.

 

 

 

 

July 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for dVerse Poets

Open Link Night

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Waves, detail 1969 ©  Javier Torices    Fair Use

Study for the Spanish Dance, 1869  © John Singer Sargent   Fair Use

Heartbeat

 

 

Heartbeat

 

 

 

 

The earth is aching where I walk and never learn,

her broad abiding back riven and split

by the wedge of heat and maul-strikes of the sun;

she was never meant to look so desolate,

 

nor the sickle moon give up her soul to burn.

Sere ghosts of a dead storm blow like yellow leaves

to the grassfire hell-combustion at full day's cairn,

bellies swelled on dust and smoke until they heave.

 

But still I see young hawks on thermal towers,

hear the cricket scrape his withered legs and sing,

know it's a fool who digs a graveyard for the flowers

for life is the deathless husband of these things.

 

I am an iron weight that soon must drop;

earth is a heartbeat fire cannot stop.

 

 

 

July 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for earthweal's

Open Link Weekend

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Note: Temperatures here in Oklahoma are expected to stay between 100 and 110 through July and into August. We haven't had extended extreme heat like this since 2012, and it was awful then.We pray the power grid holds, the A/C doesn't die and just huddle down and try to make it through the wildfires and heat exhaustion, but many parts of the world are seeing temperatures like these where they have never existed before and are unprepared for its force, enduring great hardship. I extend my sympathies. Take care as much as you can; it sucks, and it can kill.

 

 

 

 

 Images © joyannjones, july 2022

 

The Burning Tongue

 

 

 

 

 

The Burning Tongue

 

 

 

There is a burning that

makes the same smoke

from flower or flesh.

 

Air is dead.

Sound will not carry.

Words will not form

 

on a tongue blackened by 

summer's brass palm, for weeks

held radiant over earth's dry mouth.

Heat is a cloud-killer, builder

of invincible domes in steelmelt

sky. Dust catches fire.

 

Only the insect machines

still rattle. Yet every morning

in the stillborn dawn

 

there is a gasp of birdsong,

begging and faint, staccato, sharp,

freezingly sweet. 

 

In fever dreams

I gasp along, for every note,

for any word, for a charm

 

to make this yield

of burning tongues

sing out

 

in oldest music, 

wilder words,

the sparking chant

 

that death-heat kills even itself,

that someday it might

still be worth the parch

of trying to keep living.

July 2022

posted for earthweal

Wild Language

Images: Dead Woman's Crossing, Oklahoma  by Nathan Gunter   Fair Use

L'oiseau blue,© Marc Chagall 1968     Fair Use