Occultation and Conjunction

Occultation And Conjunction

Our dance was like the firefly's with night,

sowing the black fields of plush eclipse

with frail and sulfurous intermittent light;

or like the dotted waltz of Moon and Mars

spaced ringing in the void on the ellipse,

made to shudder close and rebound far

to the heavy metal strings of sun's guitar.

So close were we, so paired where gravity slips,

to earthbound eyes it seemed we sometimes touched.

Yet one of us was always unconjunct,

occluded and deluded in the rushed

ambition of a self-rule lost to us

for in that moonlit field of anthracite,

what struts like a planet is really a satellite.

~January 2016

posted for real toads

Play It Again: Weekend Photo Challenge

Photography  © Daryl Edelstein

Not Love

Not Love

Laying in our single skin

eye to eye amalgamate

sewn together aggregate

to float the amniotic sea

waiting to be born

you couldn't use a word like love

so small, so ego-ish, presuming choice

of masks, of roles, all fantasy

too many strings, obscuring voice

of one silence-shredding scripted  horn.

No, more a centaur mythed to be

living dual without control

hooved with chaos black and gold

unrolled, unroled, itself the work

unfolding terrible and bright

as the amaranthine dancestep

at sun's core, but purely animal

the way that flesh and fur keep hurt

burnt deep below the liminal

too-knowing glance, the sharp white bite.

~June 2014

A contrarian  ten-line stanza form I just invented, and a poem for no prompt whatsoever. 

Rebel rebel--my hair's a mess.

Image: Struggle Between Woman And Centaur,  circa 1905, by Odilon Redon

Public Domain, via wikiart,org

The Sun King

The Sun King Comes to America 

A Rondeau

The Sun King’s here, stiff with a smile,

robes of brocade, gold tongue of guile.

Dappled mist melts, senses take flight.

Owl is proved wrong and buzzard right,

the Sun King’s here.

His rays rain over mile on mile,

burning the fair, shading the vile;

angels' despair, gamblers' delight,

with all our gold to spend tonight,

the Sun King’s here.

Darkness slaps back light’s denial.

Truth keeps her mouth shut at the trial.

Gaia bleeds out, war-weak and white,

drained by a blindworm parasite.

Drinking nectar, excreting bile,

the Sun King’s here.

June 2011

Posted for  Friday Poetically  at the inimitable OneStopPoetry

Friday Poetically is hosted by Brian Miller, who I hope will forgive me for taking liberties with his prompt, which was to "write a poem about the sun, heat or use it as a metaphor..." 

The rondeau form is explained here at wikipedia

Louis XIV… known as the Sun King was an absolute monarch, King of France from 1643 to 1715(72 years.) You can find out a bit more about him at his wikipedia  entry if interested. I have chosen to employ him here in a symbolic aspect.

Gaea (Gaia)~the ancient Greek goddess of the earth, mother of the Titans.

Image: Louis XIV as Apollo, 1653,  artist not named, courtesy of wikimedia commons