Photo: Na’ama Yehuda
May the birth of day
Delight you
In the promise
That it brings,
Even with the clear
Potential
For the pulling of
Heart’s strings.
May you know
The hope of
Morning
As it touches
First light’s bliss.
May the good
Outweigh the painful
As tender dawn
To ocean
Kiss.
For the Sunday Stills challenge: Birthdays
Photo: Karen Forte
Oh, you King
Of the branch,
Emperor of your
Nestlings,
Purple robe
Golden crown,
Your perch all
Pomp and
Whistling.
For the dVerse poetry challenge: Majestic
Photo: Hu Chen on Unsplash
She could not get enough of him.
She’d spent the last few hours gazing at him as he slept.
She could spend another lifetime.
Nothing could replace the sweet contour of his back, the curve of his neck, the fists that could fly deliciously out of tempo with his kicking, the softness of his cheeks dimpled into smile.
His breath.
Joy expanded her chest and spread a warmth under her skin that flushed through her soul to fill her with a flood of well-being.
She was his forever grandmother.
Note: Dedicated to all the grandmothers and great-grandmothers. To the aunts and great-aunts. To the mothers and mothers-to-be. To the grandfathers and great-grands, to the uncles and fathers. May you know this love, for nothing can replace it.
For Sammi’s Weekend Writing Prompt: Replace in 89 words
Photo: Anthony Garand on Unsplash
When the truth flees the sphere
Of those who power corrupts
And the lies become leaders’ way
To disrupt,
It behooves us to hold strong
To not let those confound
As we keep our eyes on
A true moral ground:
To be firm
To be kind
To keep light
In our mind,
And to not get swept up
In the feverish flow
Of those who prefer we
Give up and
Let go
Of core truths
And the law,
And forget how
Foreshadowed
In wisdom galore
Founders sought separation
Of powers before
And checks out to balance
Against tyrannical war,
Predicting the day
When ambition to rule
Would rise in someone
Who’d attempt to befool
And try to prop
Lies for a flop
And our constitution
For corruption
To swap.
For Linda Hill’s SoCS challenge: Ground
She stood on the ledge and watched the edge of the world dissolve into fire.
It had been a long day, waiting. He did not come. She did not know when he could. Only that he would when he managed to get free.
As she had.
It was their place. Before. It will be their home. Now.
They’d found the small cave down the rock-face when they were still children frolicking in the waves. They’d been rolling with a large piece of driftwood one day when the currents had taken them farther than they’d expected. They’d tried to reverse course but it was futile to fight the sea. It was after reality had set in and they’d began to fret in earnest, that they’d spotted what looked like a black tooth on the jagged cliff. As Merlin tried to point to it, the log rolled, depositing the two of them into the waves and bestowing a farewell knock on Marla’s head. It had gone black behind her eyes after that.
Merlin had managed to drag her to and onto the surf-beaten rocks, scraping both of them raw in the process. He claimed the seals had helped him and she never doubted it. Nor that the seals had likely rolled the log in the only spot the two of them might’ve had a chance of getting to the shore unbroken.
They had clawed their way slowly up to the ledge, crying and more than a little frightened, only to find that what had appeared a black tooth from the sea, was in fact a cave’s mouth that was dry and deep enough to offer shelter. The marvel had calmed them enough to explore, and they’d found a precarious but doable foot- and hand-hold way to gain access up to the top of the cliff. And from there across the moors home.
They’d made a pact to never tell anyone about “Stone Face” — named for how the features could be read in the rock above the ledge. They suffered the indignities of being mocked for slipping into a whirlpool — the story they’d made up to explain their miserable condition and the lateness of their arrival home — and they endured the punishment of being forbidden from going to play in the water for the rest of that long summer, and the drudgery of extra chores.
It did not matter. Their secret sustained them. As had their rare visits to Stone Face via the barely-there climbing way. It was their refuge and all the more a miracle to them for how no one had known of it (or at least not in their lifetime, for there were signs of hearth-fires on the blackened ceiling and some stone flakes that could cut deep and might’ve been a tool in someone’s hand). It was their place of hopes and dreams and stories.
Then time came and Merlin was indentured to the Smithy, and Marla was sent off to scrub the floors and bear the fists and the bastard children of Lord Bowery, a man of no nobility in deportment or form. She tried to endure him, but the core of her rebelled against his injustices and his brutal invasions. She fled.
The Smithy’s apprentice was due to bring brackets to the manor’s door that week. She had to trust that he would find out she was gone.
And that he would come for her.
To make Stone Face, home.
For Sue Vincent’s WritePhoto: Stillness
She’d needed this for so long she almost did not know what to do with it. The sense of expansion felt as if it would crush her chest from the inside. The freedom felt disorienting. The quiet deafened. The freshness of the air dug splinters in her lungs.
It was the yearning, really. The slow release of what she had compressed herself into, for absolutely way too long.
Like pins and needles of a ‘fallen asleep’ limb waking up, it was. Only that this was her soul awakening, her spirit that she’d squelched into an air-tight packet and had pushed into a too-small drawer. Her way to survive.
She’d done this to herself, in a way. She realized. Sure, she could blame others for the part they played, but in the end it was her own small choices to ignore and minimize and shrug off and explain away, that slowly but resolutely coiled herself into herself, and did it so completely that she’d began believing herself to be devoid of need or want or urges to do more than what was outwardly expected.
So she’d stopped taking time for herself. She’d stopped going into nature. She’d stopped asking what she loved, or inquiring what she lost, or still required.
Till that day, when the small worm of “maybe,” fed by events that almost forced her hand, led to a gap in her calendar, and to a decision she could not quite explain to herself. A caprice, it felt, to rent a car and go — without a definite plan or conscious understanding of its meaning — into the wilder parts outside the concrete jungle that had become home.
And with the first crunch of her feet onto the leaf-strewn path, something inside her belly and right above her heart began to crack.
She let the wind carry her tears in zigzags on her cheeks. She used her sleeve to wipe her nose, as heedless as a child and as contentedly miserable. She cried because she could. She felt the ache and wronged bewilderment rise in her, slow at first, then unrestrained in its demand to be freed from the confines of denial and regret.
When she’d first left the car at the makeshift parking by the hiking trail, she thought she’d just stretch her legs a bit and perhaps take a few photos of the foliage. She didn’t realize — or perhaps she had but her spirit guarded it a secret so that, too, not be squashed — that there was far more inside her that needed a bit of stretching out. And that once out of the box that confined it, it swelled and would not be going back.
The air around her rustled and a flock of geese curved a misshapen arrow overhead, heading to a warmer clime. She spread her arms and closed her eyes and twirled a slow circle around.
She’d needed this for so long that she almost did not know what to do with it. But she was going to find out.
As the space in her chest fought to accommodate the rise of feelings, the rush of hope finally allowed her to truly inflate her lungs. The leaves around her crumbled to the touch even as more of them floated down to crown her head and shoulders. Some things in her were crumbling, too, even as others — light as golden feathers — came to rest like beacons on a path back to who she was.
For Sue Vincent’s WritePhoto challenge: Copper
Photo: Na’ama Yehuda
She hangs out next to the couch, wrapped around the floor lamp like a hand in a hand. She’s been there a long time. She lived on other floor lamps before this one, till their time had come and she welcomed a new one. She makes friends with them all, says goodbye to those who lost their spark. Perhaps she thinks of them, sometimes.
She hangs out next to the couch, wrapped around the floor lamp like a protective palm over a young hand. She watches little fingers wrestling beads onto threads, listens as small mouths make words out of thoughts, witnesses big hearts in tiny chests writing grand ideas into evolving minds – theirs and mine.
She hangs out next to the blue couch. She hears the unasked questions that stay behind worried parents’ lips. The questions children ask, sometimes for the first time. She understands. She does not prod. She just knows. They look for her, especially after a long break, reassured to find her there, still wrapped around the floor lamp like a comfy hug.
She’s been there long enough to find the right time to catch their eye.
With a quiet smile.
Blue Belle on her perch by the couch. Patience in her heart, twinkle in her eye.
For Linda Hill’s SoCS prompt: Blue (first blue object you see)
Photo: Smadar Halperin-Epshtein
Undulating trip
On triangular
Height
Soon reaching top speed
In centrifugal
Flight.
For One Word Sunday: Triangles
“This is where it broke out.”
Bender shaded his eyes from the glare and squinted at the black patch on the meandering snake of ice.
“Tis a mighty small one, then,” he noted.
Roman frowned. “That hole is bigger up close. And anyway, you should’ve seen the length of it.”
Bender shrugged and took a few steps closer, daring Roman to do the same. The ice crunched under their feet, a staccato to their accelerating heartbeat.
They would be punished for walking here. The Winter Gods had taken too many who strayed onto what masqueraded as solid ground but was in fact bog fairies lurking beneath frosted fronds. Even in summer these flats were dangerous, full of sinkholes and swampy ponds that sucked at your feet and then leeched out your blood. Children were outright forbidden from entering the bog.
Which made the space all the more alluring to boys who had to prove bravery and test the lore.
For there was a boy, the stories told, who got swallowed by a sinkhole only to be adopted by the creek and made half-human and half-snake. He could breathe both in the air and underwater, and came to hunt in winter, when other snakes were slowed by cold.
Some had said they’d seen it, slithering among the silver plants by dusk and dawn. Some even claimed to have escaped its grasp — for the half-boy-half-snake had arms that ended in sharp claws held close to it’s lower body as it undulated silently toward its prey. One man had four parallel scars upon his calf that he said were the proof of his escaping the creature.
Roman said he’d seen it, slipping out of the ice.
Bender never could trust Roman’s sight, influenced as it tended to be by what his friend wished to see but often did not. Still, to say so would be showing him a coward … so … Bender took another step, crunching deeper into the foreboding land.
Behind him, Roman breathed out clouds of exhalation accentuated by shorter puffs of terror. “Perhaps it had gone back in already,” he whispered.
“Yeah,” Bender gasped in barely masked relief. “Must have. After all, it is almost full light. Nothing for it but for us, too, to head back.”
For Sue Vincent’s WritePhoto prompt
Photo: D. Freedman
In between the wish for more
And need for less
She paused to let the breeze pass
Through
And transform her
From the rushing steps that never seem to
Gain foothold
On life,
To the tranquility of what is
Yet
to be left
Behind.
For the dVerse poetry quadrille challenge: tranquility
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