In The Still

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 In The Still

 

 

In the still

of the silenced

so deep, I can hear

the gestation of dew, 

the guard-bird's desperate heart

at her nest, the moth's sibilant fumbling

where she lays her last egg;

 

yet not the padding

soft-footed sleep

that carries us empty

into tomorrow.

May 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for earthweal's Lessons from the Wild

hosted by Sherry Marr 

 

 

 

and dVerse Poets'

Quadrille 

by sarahsouthwest

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Night Hill, © Andrea Kowch All Rights Reserved to the Artist   Fair Use

Remember, © Zdzisław Beksiński        Fair Use

 

 

Windfall

 

 Windfall

 

 

 

Fill my glass

and let it be. The night 

moves over the unsodded graves

unquiet between

the roadhouse and road,

seventeen mounds

to home seven sins,

my vanities' bones,

my castaway loves, my old

car-killed cats.

 

Fill my glass

and let it come

at the end of the sky

when the broad brass sun

sets aslant on black apples

wind threw to ground, on

the last summer moths fluttering down,

warming them ripe for the locust's hall

with autumn's endings

packing the rows.

 

Fill my glass;

half empty is full. Let it be

as I drowse on the lawn,

sweet shattered moths and

brown thrushes for company, my

sore eyes wrapped with

a bandage of stars, peace

spilling into the void

where understanding

has flown.

 

 

 

 

 

August 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for

The Sunday Muse

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Apples, Jug, Irridescent Glass, © Paul Gauguin  Public Domain Manipulated.

Night Hill  © Andrea Kowch All Rights Reserved   Fair Use

Photograph of cat and wineglass from Sunday Muse, artist unknown. Fair Use

 

Moon Moth

Moon Moth

I made my home

on a broken world

that I found in the space

between breaths,

golden dark as your eyes

long ago 

fireflies, quenched moons

yellow with light in

the river mist.

Time crawled out

on my veins

like an inchworm and hung,

a floating cocoon

spun from brown autumn's dust.

One dream

in a decade kept a blind sun's vigil

on the soft shape within, and

time's opalescent shell

pledged a constancy malleable

to the formless thing

growing her wings.

All this while

I wandered as a wind

in the tree of bound hours, 

up and down, warm

 in your scent of basil and chai

til the years at last

became harder

than miles

til the earth became still

till the flowers sighed,

waiting for time

to fall or fly.

~February 2020

posted for earthweal's challenge

A Clockwork Green 

Brendan asks us to look at time, the natural world, and many other things this week, out of which I chose : "What happened to time? Spin the clockfaces crazily and get a feel for a present both timesick and solastalgic."

Images: Moth Wing ©Amelia Fletcher   Fair Use

The Lonely Cedar, 1907 ©Tivadar Koszta Csontvary   Public Domain

The Last Spell

The Last Spell

The sorceress said:

My blue eye comes from a peacock's pride,

two magpie plumes, one black, one white

are my cheekbones' span, one left, one right,

and the chilblained heart of a drunken man

beats out time for the madwoman's rhyme

that runs through my nodding head.

The hedgewitch said:

I'll work in the dark of a gone moon's quirk

with a sickle of poppy stem that I've curved

slicing dust from the wing of a moth with no sting

for a paste of bat's grease that paints shadows for skin,

nurse a mandrake root with blood, milk and soot, then dance
on one foot to the lord of hell til it smiles in my bed.

Yet none of these but this blackened art

can give back to me what died when I fell.

To make me again both young and well, my craft has no skill

except in my heart.

December 2019

posted for Kerry's final prompt at

The Imaginary Garden with Real Toads

I used Kerry's play it again selection, on the poetic voice

Images: Crone, from the internet, author unknown, Fair Use
Zenobia, © Warrick Goble, Fair Use

The Heart Moth

The Heart Moth

There was

a heart that hatched

out a moth that landed

on my mouth, to burn; burn and fly

and die.

Too long

I've waited for my lips to cool,

to live, and missed the moth

because it was

my heart.

~July 2016

posted for    real toads

Kerry's Mini-Challenge: Micropoetry 

Process Note: This is a cinquin, a short, usually unrhymed poem of twenty-two syllables in five lines arranged 2, 4, 6, 8, & 2 per line.  In the second stanza, I have reversed the order.

Images: Queen of the Night costume design, 1922, by Leon Batsk,   Fair use.

Moth, 1900,  by Albrecht Bierstadt,  Public domain.

Wing Of A Moth

Wing of a Moth

Your kiss

hangs like a moth's wing
on the wet cheek of night,

a flight interrupted, a life

separated from its whole.

It knows

all the tyranny of gravity,

this caress you cloak in air;

the past is loudest when it whispers,
aching where it smiles.

Miles after dreams

I walk soar swim,

miasma'd in a sigh, stumbled

at a stile thrown across the

pasture-path 

where pink-nosed ruminants pull

and chew your weedy lies, sluice

them stomach to stomach

til they drop to show
the truth they always were.

Bright bell of the sun,

ghost of a moth's night shadow,
wild bloom and weed

flower, fly and ring;

between we two wings
let us have lift once again.

 ~June 2016

posted for    real toads

Challenge:Weeds

Moth  © Amelia Fletcher, via internet

Weeds and Flowers, by John Henry Twachtman public domain