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 

Surrender

 

Surrender

"...this is the way the world ends/not with a bang but a whimper." ~T.S.Elliot

 

 

You've come a long way

to see me slip my skin

across the star-burrowed sky

past Cassiopeia's iron chair

past the spear of Orion

to the killing floor.

 

You've come for the show

that must always go on

to see my hair burning trees

on my lips the black hole

night for my breath

dripping acid rain.

 

A big bang for your buck

now the requisite whimper

that comes in the dark

with the last surrender.

I wanted to stay just

a little bit longer

 

but everything wavers

when fate breaks her lamp.

October 2020

posted for 

The Sunday Muse

Images: California Wildfires From Space © NASA Scott Kelly Fair Use

Title unknown © Mathew Brohder via Internet Fair Use

Daisy

Daisy

Awakenings these latter days

seem sullen, straining for

a gone green music, unprepared as

the day that lumbers up,

tripping its way through a

zodiac of sticks like a clumsy thief,

 too old to run but still wanting to steal.

Hours revolve in a maelstrom

of ferns, once fresh for morning

now a parable of crackling

 brown loss drying back to some point

of unknown where its powdering tides will

drain down earth's fissures,

intimately gone; I'm just another

torn membrane losing the lie,

spinning down the dark drown.

Still I pull all the architecture

of my ruins--the folly, the narrows,

the knot garden, the rockery of

a thousand dead alpine desires--

forward to find

a station of cleared space

to stand in place for life's moment,

asking eyes shut, seed face

blind and upturned,

 sunflowered on my stem

for one last hot meal

of yellow light;

being a daisy,

being a dream.

April 2020

posted for Kerry's

Skylover Word List for April

Note: April as always is poetry month, and though I will be writing as much as I can, it most likely will not be a poem a day. Nonetheless, I will offer to those who are the Friday 55 each week for their use if so desired. So see you here on Friday if you need a meme.

Images: The Old Tower In The Fields, 1884 by Vincent Van Gogh, Public Domain
Still Life With Four Sunflowers, 1887, by Vincent Van Gogh, Public Domain

Firebird

Firebird

While a continent becomes a sore

spreading to shingle the destitute globe, 

we lie wrapped in broiling

blinded abeyance, knee-jerking a galvanic

response that is only more of nothing.

The colossus god-thief's

gone small as a pea no longer green

beside his golden foundry,

abandoned like a warped wheel

murdered by its own machine,

shamed to a face in a clockwork locket
that's dropped too hot on a 

cowskulled outback

where fire tornadoes are the new djinns

where the breath of burned brush leaves

a path of smoking cinder, 

where even the dirt

is beginning to burn.

We are the thing that un-cocks

the flower gun, whose apocalypse hand 

knifemelts the Mother, making

her bleed a drowning of ice-water tides,

the mad un-scientists who breed 

the firebird to rise and rise again.

We are numberless now, an ashslide of rapists

pressing our weight against a mouth that would be willing

if only it could breathe.

~March 2013

(originally written as quite a different poem)

Repurposed January 2020

 for earthweal

Image: Photograph via internet, showing the Australian wildfires of 2019/20 from space. Fair Use

Fire of Imaginary Origin

Fire of Imaginary Origin

We lit a bonfire

of lies on the earth

where we burned

not vanities

but sanities,

not tree parts

but peace, hearts,

flesh and bone,

blood and stone;

and whatever we learned

as planets were turned

we watched

fall to ash, and were glad that it burned.

Winter Solstice

December, 2019

It is with sadness and great gratitude that I post to Marian's Imagine prompt at the vanishing

Imaginary Garden with Real Toads

Image: The Ladder of Fire, © Rene Magrite, 1939. Fair Use

Image of fire, author unknown, via internet. Fair Use