Not Unprepared

January 14, 2023Na'ama Yehuda Anecdotes of Life, Life and love, Muse and Flow, Poetry, Reflections, Writing Tags: Dawn, Flash Fiction, Micro-fiction, Nighttime, Poetry, Preparation, Script, Sleepless, Weekend Writing Prompt, Words 15 Comments

(Photo: Susan Wilkinson on Unsplash)

She was up all night.

Words crowded her mind. Piled atop each other, they kept coming

Impatient. Wanting to be picked.

Even the discarded ones pressed behind closed lids, trying to repeat.

A few slipped, surprising and lubricated by unexpected tears.

Of worry.

Of hope.

Of fatigue.

She tossed and turned. She wrote. She paced.

And still words tumbled. Filling every space.

In the small hours she ran the tub.

Soaked.

Prayed to soften the callouses

And the rough edges

Snagging nonsense

In her mind.

As dawn rose, she was bare.

Exhausted.

Script mulled.

Not quite ready,

But word lulled.

For Sammi’s Weekend Writing Prompt of: Script in 100 words

In Every Dawn

July 31, 2021Na'ama Yehuda Anecdotes of Life, Life and love, Meditations, Muse and Flow, Photography, Poetry, Reflections, Writing Tags: Coming Home, Creative writing, Dawn, hope, Mornings, New Beginnings, Oasis, Photography, Poetry, Weekend Writing Prompt 26 Comments

(Photo: Na’ama Yehuda)

The light spun silent waves

Of day

Into her heart,

Her chambers slowly opening

Their delicate petals

To sing

The morning’s chant.

There is a hope,

She knows,

In every dawn.

Its breath imparting

An oasis

And a coming home.

For Sammi’s Weekend Writing Prompt: Oasis in 40 words

A Morning’s Weave

July 17, 2021Na'ama Yehuda Anecdotes of Life, Life and love, Meditations, Muse and Flow, Poetry, Reflections, Writing Tags: art, Awe, Dawn, Dew, inspiration, Morning, Mosaic, Poetry, sunrise, Tessallate, Weekend Writing Prompt 16 Comments

(Photo: Anant Chandra on Unsplash)

As Sun rose

In the east

It darned

A web of light upon

The leaves,

And sprinkled gold on

Spiders’ orbs

That dangled from

The eaves.

The artist watched the dawn

And breathed.

For though her heart

Believed,

She knew her fingers

Do not have the skill

To tessellate this wonder

Into the mosaic that

Her soul

Perceived.

For Sammi’s Weekend Writing Prompt: Tessellate in 58 words

No Fade

May 16, 2020Na'ama Yehuda Anecdotes of Life, Current events, Life and love, Meditations, Muse and Flow, Poetry, Reflections, Writing Tags: Creative writing, Current events, Dawn, Finding a way, hope, humanity, Micro Poetry, Poetry, Weekend Writing Prompt, World's future, Writing Challenge 13 Comments

Photo: Lerone Pieters on Unsplash

Where faith remains in morning’s dawn,

There will not fade

The hope of light,

Breathing

Life

On.

For Sammi’s Weekend Writing Prompt: Fade in 17 words

Pink Sky Won’t Lie

November 7, 2019Na'ama Yehuda Anecdotes of Life, Life and love, Muse and Flow, Reflections, Writing Tags: belief, Dawn, Flash Fiction, Folklore, Intuition, Micro-fiction, Morning, Plans, Short Story, Warning, Weather, WritePhoto 30 Comments

Photo: Sue Vincent

There it was.

Now she knew what would certainly happen. It did not matter that the calendar had counted down the days for many weeks. It did not matter that arrangements have been made, checklists marked, letters sent, particulars organized. She suspected, she resisted, she pretended …

Till now.

“Pink sky won’t lie,” her grandfather had always said. A fisherman all his life, he’d counted on the minutia of the heavens to warn or greet his days.

She’d learned to accept his observations, no matter how disappointed she was with a last minute reversal of plans he’d made for her to go with him. “The water is no place for children today,” he’d say. And saddened though she’d be, she knew enough to respect his judgment of the weather, and knew him well enough to know that nothing she could say or do would dissuade him once he’d made up his mind.

“God may control the weather,” he’d tell her (though always well out of earshot of her grandmother, who would’ve boxed his ears for speaking heresy, grown man or not). “But to me the weather is the real God. I can’t see God, but I sure can see these skies, and I know what they tell me. I heed those clouds. I heed those waves. I heed those colors in the sky.”

And heed he had. Though heeding did not mean one could always escape the wrath of what was coming.

The waves had claimed her grandfather when she was not yet ten. A fast-moving storm that all had later said no one could’ve out-rowed. She almost stopped believing after that. Stopped taking heed.

Because if Grandfather couldn’t read the sky or if the sky could hide its meaning from him, why even bother trying? What will be, will be. Que Sera sera.

And yet, someplace, she never did stop checking the color of the heavens every morning. Somehow, she never did stop glancing out of windows, no matter where in the world she found herself, or how far from any seas or oceans.

Oh, she listened to the forecast. She had the Telly on while she got herself ready for the day. She checked the extended before she packed.

Yet she trusted few things better than what her own eyes showed her: Pink sky at night, sailor’s delight. Pink sky in the morning, means sailor’s warning.

The sky were ablaze.

It was dawn.

She considered herself warned.

For Sue Vincent’s WritePhoto Challenge

The Birth Of Day

October 20, 2019November 12, 2019Na'ama Yehuda Anecdotes of Life, Life and love, Meditations, Muse and Flow, Photography, Poetry, Reflections, Writing Tags: Acceptance, Birthday, blessing, Creative writing, Dawn, hope, Meditation, New Beginnings, Photo Challenge, Poetry, Sunday Stills 22 Comments

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

Where It Broke Out

August 29, 2019August 29, 2019Na'ama Yehuda Anecdotes of Life, Life and love, Muse and Flow, Reflections, Things Kids Say, Writing Tags: Creative writing, Dawn, FlashFiction, Folklore, Frozen, On a dare, Short Story, Warning, WritePhoto, Writing Challenge, Writing prompt 28 Comments

Photo: Sue Vincent

“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

A New Dawn

March 12, 2019Na'ama Yehuda Anecdotes of Life, Life and love, Muse and Flow, Photography, Reflections, Resources and links, Writing Tags: Beauty, Book Excerpt, Dawn, fpj-photo-challenge, light, Novel, Outlawed Hope, Photo prompt, Photography, sunrise, Writing 7 Comments

Photo: Karen Forte

“…There’s a special beauty to the world resuming definition. I always loved pre-dawn and the gradual emergence of the world from under wraps of darkness. A hesitant light followed by a glorious brush of sunrise obliterating the black with oranges and yellows so bright you must look away and blink, only to find morning had arrived.

I walked faster now that I could see more of the ground in front of me. Brambles and tangled roots were easier to avoid and step over when I didn’t need to test every step.

Sunrise in the forest felt gentler than the ones I’d sat through on my porch. Not so much a blinding line of light across the sky as it was a filtering of color working its way from the canopies above and down the foliage, branches, trunks and finally the ground. Tired and worried, I still found myself mesmerized by the wonder of it all. Goosebumps covered my arms not only from the morning chill but also from something that felt almost like a memory: pink sky chasing blue across the ceiling of the world, the dazzled dance of dust along the shafts of molten, golden light. It felt familiar. Maybe I had seen a forest-sunrise during my own life’s dawn. …”

(Excerpt from “Outlawed Hope”)

For the Tuesday Photo Challenge: Sunrise