The Spot

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Spot

 

 

The black spot came on a sunny day.

It was small but full as a school for ants

each one learning to swarm, to eat, to

serve the next. Where will I go when they

finish with me, in autumn rain when

I fall like a leaf

from the tree of my life.

 

All my souls will be flying on the wind,

a storm of stories ahead of the wavering night.

I trace with a crow's feather the map

they travel on my skin 

the winding and the blowing away. Which

dark bird dropped it, what ink has dripped it

on time's page, the black spot that came

 

on a sunny day

and will not go away. 

March 2025

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for the Word Garden Word List

at Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images:Ants, © Dunja Zubak  via internet   Fair Use

Crows in flight, via internet author unknown    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

Sting

Sting

I never knew I slept 

because so many times 

I don't, with the rocks

hot hard icy, but

I woke to find

you'd left in the night

and taken the water.

I put a stone in my mouth

at noon, when my lips

had already split,

when I had no more spit,

when my tongue swelled
 fat-

 tight to palate

as mackerel in a can,

but it wasn't much good,

and the cowskull hat

left behind by the dead

I thought might shade my head

only put the red bite

of ants in my hair.

So I spat out the stone,

lay down with the scorpions,

waiting waking

for the long

cold night,

for the black starcrash

of sleep that comes

after

the sting.

~November 2013,

revised March 2014

posted for    real toads

Words Count With Mama Zen: Challenge: Insomnia

Be sure to check out Mama Zen's interview with Oklahoma's current Poet Laureate, Nathan Brown, at the link above.
EDIT:The challenge asks for a poem in 60 words or less--I completely missed that line, and apologize to everyone, especially Mama Zen, for blowing the guidelines so thoroughly.

Images:Top: Scorpion Glow, by Howard Dickins on flick'r

Shared under a Creative Commons License

Footer: From The far Away Near, 1938, Georgia O'Keefe

May be protected by copyright. Posted under fair use guidelines via wikipaintings.org

Informing The Wind

Informing The Wind

Show that black face of daggers,

say 'Everything

everything can be taken,'

before we grow too used to kindness

before we think our plastic baskets

were meant to hold the world.

Take the bricks and boards we push up,
our antnest parades, parapets and pillars.

Shake them like a blanket

into holes, tumbled holes, full of

the nothing that

we really are.

Blow out every tiny act

that marks our place, break it in scarlet,

fly it away with your empyreal breath,

consumed and exhaled in a cloning of dust;

then perhaps the time will come

when we are able to believe

we have no dominion over

anything we see.

~June 2013

posted for     real toads

Open Link Monday

Image: via flick'r creative commons

Tornado in mature stage of development. Photo #3 of a series of classic photographs of this tornado. Oklahoma, Enid. June 5, 1966.

Photographer: Leo Ainsworth.
Credit: NOAA Photo Library, NOAA Central Library; OAR/ERL/National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL)