Pinball Christmas

Pinball Christmas

The wind remembers the snow spirit

when the hunger moon paints clouds

flaxen with pearl.  Christmas is out

somewhere knocking

against lamp-poles like a steel ball

in a Jotun's bar machine

looking to clang a bell

over a red kettle with slit lid

past which a clamor of people

pass quicker, suddenly stiff,

fever eyes cast down, wary of any

expectation to give

here in the Land of the Take.

Christmas is nowhere, I say,

 in music or mind, only perhaps

in the rebound of blurred lights that fight

against the black buffer of December night,

striking their sparks where the heart is least bright.

~December 2019

Images: Salvation Army Bell Ringer, author unknown, manipulated, fair use

Christmas tree, 12/13/19, © joyannjones

The Winter Cabin

by Jenny Leslie

The Winter Cabin

Ghosts on the floor,

crumpled at the fortieth failure,

tousled and tossed down to

decorate dead December.

They're waiting unread

in the winter cabin

where the plague has been

and gone;

only goodbye

left of all their words;

only a snow-flaked feather

remembers the bluebirds

too small to save the world.

~December 2016

posted for  real toads

A Snow Birthed Tale in 13 lines

for my friend Magaly

Thanks to Jenny Leslie for the kind use of her image.

To Go

To Go

There were no candles

at our table, angel child,

for we were in a place where

no fire would burn, no light shine

except the sickly phosphorescence

of the unquiet mind.

The love I talked

came out in tears.

The anger in your eyes

spit out my pointless words.

After you walked out

and left me burning there

the waiter brought the check

and took my plastic coin

in the profound silence of

the servant's protective tact;

I stumbled in a mist

of dread upheld, too slow

from sour cream and salt

on the still-full glass,

but remembering to

fumble up at the last

the greasy bag of

leftover hate to go.

~March 2015, 

revised November for

Fireblossom Friday: Dread

 

Images: Greasy Takeout Bag, author unknown, via google.Manipulated.

The Pink Candle, 1910, by Henri Rousseau, public domain via wikiart.org

The Burnt Angel

The Burnt Angel

Following the jesus of absence,

flying on the defunct

pegasus line,

will the angel come again

when the moon walks through the pines

or under the yolk of sun

frying unbroken above, or

on the dancing floor

where  flying leaves have one last waltz

before they're dirt and leaves no more?

Will the tongue

that was a biting worm

push deep into the shifting worlds

to eat the wide silence

of the last legends ever heard?

How will the hands

that broke down stone by stone

each road and arch, bricked bridge and hall

pile up that rampart place at last

without rafter or wall?

The icewind says nothing

in her bully brief run;

nothing to the questions

the coming dark

asks the sun.

Pegasus flies, but

Icarus tumbles

burning

down.

~December 2014

posted for    real toads

Kerry's Weekend Challenge: In Other Words

Kerry O'Connor has been doing a series of prompts focusing on word replacement in the titles of various works. This week she turns us towards some Christmas-oriented titles--yes, this is about Christmas, of the hedgewitchian kind. I have been out of action for awhile, but couldn't miss Kerry's last prompt of the year.

Image: Pegasus, by Wojciech Siudmak

Fair use via wikiart.org

Emeralds For Breakfast

Emeralds For Breakfast

Once you gave me

emeralds for breakfast,

moonstones in the afternoons.

You set gold rings into each ear

each one a twist of  jade-apple sun

summer, inhaled from the calyx chalice

to the hot noise of bee-breached flowers.

Somehow the bright green

spilled; the gilt light dulled

gives way to silver

in the cold-hag's time

when earth sleeps brown

and billowing in surrender

and  there is only winter

staggering to me

my lost lamb, her snow

thin and matted, pulled sleet-grey

lean with a gift of famine,

delicate ice diamonds shivering

cold, cold, around her neck

begging for the garland

of  even my

freezing  arms.

~December 2014

Image: Angelina stonecrop (Sedum rupestre 'Angelina')

Ice Blossoms

copyright joyannjones, 2013, 2014

Evergreen

Evergreen

For
Christmas
one  year my
grandmother  got  a
small poinsettia, feet wrapped
in green foil, top red as the blood
 on the split palms of Jesus over her bed,
a scarlet  exotic swaying its  tropical  hips,

taller each winter, bloomlessly braced on a broken
hula-hoop, reborn evergreen; in her house, like Christmas,

things always
lived..

~December 2013

55 red, green and blue memories for     the g-man

Process notes: photo is of my Swedish grandparents, Clara and Ragner, on one of their sixty-odd wedding anniversaries.( I'm guessing year 30 here.) My grandmother's dress was river blue with grey-blue, pale green, and white paisleys, very filmy, and my grandfather's tie, his favorite, was dark blue and loud with a gold/deep green leaf design. The poinsettia was literally both an exotic and an extravagance back then--I believe it was a gift from one of my uncles--and it did end up, rather emaciated but huge ,staked  on an old red hula-hoop in a giant pot, where it grew like a vine and was alive the last time I saw her, Christmas 1976,

Photo (c) joyannjones. All rights reserved.