Photo: Na’ama Yehuda
On this Earth Day
As we are all
One,
Cooped in
Holding on,
Blue around the fingertips
Blue around the lips,
Blue in oceans, and
In the reflections of the deep,
Blue in sorrow
Blue as sky lift
Dark sapphire
To the reified aqua
Of hope.
May we rise
Like the sun,
And not forget how
We can
Help each other
Cope.
For Terri’s SundayStills: Earth
Photo: Smadar Halperin-Epshtein
In the big scale
Of things
Where watershed moments
Froth and fall in
Flush forward,
Each of us but a dot
Drenched in mist
Hoping life
Flows without
A fast-forward.
For the Tuesday Photo Challenge: Scale
Photo prompt: Roger Bultot
“She keeps the shelves half-empty.”
I turned at the voice. A gnarled hand leaned heavily on a carved stick. The man’s chest was almost parallel to the stained cement floor.
I crouched so I could make eye-contact yet spare him the strain of lifting his head. He smiled. For such an ossified body, his expression was remarkably lively.
“My wife,” he raised an eyebrow at the display. “I’d space the boxes, but she says that what people think we ain’t got much of, reminds them of the empty spaces in their own pantries and how there’s always room for more.”
For Rochelle’s Friday Fictioneers
Photo: Na’ama Yehuda
She found a spot
Inside herself
That fed the spring
Of peace
She’d always known
Was there.
For Sunday Stills: Peace (also, Happy Birthday, Terri!)
Photo: Smadar Halperin-Epshtein
Up steep stairs
Of old, new places
He is reaching up
Hand over hand.
Bravely mastering
The gaps that make it,
Way too frightening
To stand.
Up he goes,
A little hero,
Climbing life’s thrilling
Demand.
In his moment of
Adventure,
Oblivious
To just how well we
Understand.
For the Tuesday Photo Challenge: Steep
Photo: Na’ama Yehuda
It does not always work to take
A seat
Head on.
Sometimes the best way
Is
To come at it
As if you’d really meant to move
Along.
For Cee’s Black&White Photo Challenge: Side of things
After weeks of gray and thistles and ceaseless wind that scraped her raw, there was light.
She could scarcely believe it at first.
The cloud cover had been so complete for so long that she’d began wondering if there was even a real sun still behind it. The revolutions of soupy daylight and inky nights felt equally murky as every step became oppressive. She had waking dreams of being lost inside a massive warehouse, a mouse in a maze, endlessly seeking an exit yet seeing none.
She wondered whether there was still use in trying. She was oh so tired.
Now there was a break. The sky spawned a cavity and the leaden heavens began to dissipate. She could discern a layer of ease in the distance.
And light, streaming like caressing fingers ahead. Showing the way home.
Note: Dedicated to the all-too-many who are staggering through their personal wilderness, caught in the molasses of gloom, and thinking of giving up — keep on, hold on. There’s light ahead, and we’re leaving it on for you.
For Sue Vincent’s WritePhoto challenge
Photo: Na’ama Yehuda
It will be the couch for me today, after a bit more lifting, hopping, sliding, climbing, carrying, skipping, and bending, than my sort-of-hanging-in-there spine is happy with.
Not that I regret any of the evasive maneuvers to ‘prevent’ a giggling toddler from stepping on my shadow … Not that I regret going down the slide (well, a little … going down wasn’t the issue, getting back up was … I swear they put these toddler-level things lower and lower to the ground … ;)). Not that I regret counting ducks and spotting turtles, tracking helicopters in the sky, crouching to fix sandals and greet puppies, or examining mini-melted-puddles on park-paths of what might’ve been a dropped ice-cream (the alternative is gnarlier…). I don’t even regret riding hippos “to Israel and also to the Zoo” (yep, New York’s got a whole bloat of tolerant Hippos in the Safari Playground — and no offense to the hippopotami for the term — I don’t make English, I just use is …).
T’was all of it a lot of fun, it was. Delightful as every time spent with this knee-high to a grasshopper of a peanut is. Love that gal to the moon and Mars and back (whether we get there on or off the back of a hippo calf). But this does not mean there’s no piper to pay.
So, I’m paying the piper today. (Hopefully only today …)
And it’ll be slow transitions on and off the couch and bed and chair. And some Ibuprofen, and Biofreeze and Arnica salve, and the duck-wobble molasses-like moving that is the package deal in a body a bit too willowy and quite a bit too finicky than its inhabitant likes to accept, but perhaps should.
Or won’t.
Because.
Life’s too short and couches got to earn their keep somehow.
For Linda Hills SoCS prompt: Couch
Photo: Inbar Asif
The sweetness will mellow,
Proofed with time,
To become its own rich
Memory
Of ways
To be wise
Be full
Be kind.
For Sammi’s Weekend Writing Prompt: Vintage in 22 words
She always went to the beach for a bit of clarity.
The movement of the water on the sand brought her back into her own breath. The rush of energy reminded her of the push of arteries, the pull of veins. The predictably irregular rhythm of the surf reminded her how ebb and flow do not mean that things will be uniform. They’ll come and go. Each unique. Each set its own and inseparable from what flowed forth before and what is following.
She could count on a wave and then another and another, on the rise and fall, the crash and wash, the small detritus that each leaves and yet is part of what had been and what will be and what just is.
Like life.
Like the muddy, murky, uncertainties of everything.
Where the one thing she could trust was that another wave will come, and that even the biggest wave retreats, at some point, in wavelets of resignation. As another one rolls in.
For Sue Vincent’s WritePhoto challenge
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