It seems as though you are still summer:
The leaves still green atop your trees
Waves still warm inside your eyes
Sunrise haze in your sky
Sunset late to bed
As sleep lights in
Your soft breath
Upon
Mine.
NONET prompt: “It seems as though you are still summer” (Merwin)
For dVerse poetic 9
Photo: Sue Vincent
They filed into the toothy circle, a long double line, holding hands over the green strip that split them apart.
The stone pillars stood, immobile, ever present, waiting.
There have always been golden fields in all directions. Wild, then cultivated. The rustling of the ripened plants replacing a hush that would otherwise feed unease.
For there will be no voice heard.
No word.
No song.
No shout.
Nothing said.
Just a long line of humility, stepping up the path and through the eye of the ancient circle. Waiting to be cleansed.
To be whole.
To be seen.
To walk on.
Ahead.
Out the other side and down the second path where a widening triangle fanned into the distant horizon, mirroring the measure of relief.
And from the far far spaces, well beyond the hills, the sound of voices, whispers freed, a humming on the breeze.
Photo: Ofir Asif
There was no shade to be had.
No shelter from onslaughts
Of glaring heat,
Too bright.
There was no shade to be had.
Exposed as they were
To everything
In sight.
There was no shade to be had,
Other than what they
Conveyed in
A shrug.
No shade other than the small frowns
That communicated how
Very much in need
They were of a
Sheltering
Hug.
For Linda Hill’s SoCS writing prompt: Shade
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
Luanda, Angola; by Jorje sa Pinheiro
“Why is the top of that mountain rusty?” he asked.
His grandmother’s hand tightened gently around his wrist, then released it, almost in apology.
“For your ancestors,” she said.
He looked at her, uncomprehending. She had a way of speaking without saying everything she meant or with saying more than she meant and then cloaking it so it was still a tangle of implied meanings. He didn’t always know which it was. Or both. Her lined face was held up in what looked more like grief than awe.
“Grandma?” he asked.
“This rust is the mountain holding up the iron bled by your great-grandfather’s chains and the chains of those before him, and before, so many generations that the rust of those shackles rose up. It is the blood of the mountain and like the blood in your veins, it is them. They live in it. They live in you.
For the What Pegman Saw challenge: Angola
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: 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
Photo: Na’ama Yehuda
Up close
The purple pinks into the blue
And makes the hues
Shine through.
Up close
You can forget yourself
As edges curl
And bloom unfurls
In you.
They none of them could explain when it had been built or how it had been done. The standing stones were magic enough, but the slab of solid rock perching above their heads against the laws of order and human power — it went beyond what anyone understood.
Even The Sage did not know.
And she knew everything there was to learn and some of what could not be taught yet she ascertained anyhow.
“Though I heard say …” The Sage stretched the words as every child and many an adult leaned into her speaking. It was the mid-of-day that followed the longest morning. A time of pause and story. “… that it could have been the Angel Bird.”
The elder’s wisps of hair haloed her face. The oval itself was shadowed by the relative darkness under the stone overhang.
A child shifted in his mother’s lap. An errant toddler was reprimanded. A baby’s wail was quieted by its mother’s nipple. The people settled.
The Sage lifted her chin and many eyes followed. Soot and marks of time tanned the gray expanse above.
“In her beak, the Angel Bird can carry many men into the sea. Her wings can mask the stars so fishers lose the way back to their hearths. She can lift a whale and place it on the shore to feed the people. She can bring the howling wind. She can ice the river. She can slash the fire in the skies. Yet she can also pluck a clover and carve a snowflake. She can blow a single hair off of an ailing person’s forehead and lead them back to health or to the place-of-no-more-breath. … ” The Sage paused and filled her own lungs with air. “Perhaps the Angel Bird was the one to lift the slab atop the pillars.”
“Can she take it down?”
An admonishing murmur rose. Young voice or not, saying a thing made it. Now the notion hung above them like storm-clouds. Fear thickened the air but to state the worry might make it, too.
The Sage raised her palm but let the silence linger. Her eyes wandered over the cracks and small crevices of the ancient stone.
The questioning child was not to blame. The Sage had wondered similarly herself. Had her thoughts manifested through the young one’s mind? It had been known to happen. Sometimes it was a sign of too-easy a persuasion. At other times it signaled the nascent perceptiveness of a future apprentice.
The girl met The Sage’s eyes with tears brimming at the unfairness of collective condemnation, but stared on, defiant.
The latter then. The Sage allowed a corner of her lip to twitch. She’ll take it on herself to observe the child. In the meantime the girl deserved the response that had chased away many an hour of The Sage’s sleep.
“Indeed the Angel Bird can …”
People gasped. More frowns were directed at the girl, who pulled herself straighter, pushed a mess of tangled hair off her face, and squared her shoulders.
The latter. No question now.
“And she likely will. In time,” The Sage added.
An audible inhale rippled through the group as more and more faces lifted to inspect the heavy ceiling. No longer a taken-for-granted solid refuge, but a slide-between-the-fingers sand.
“All things die,” The Sage pressed on, aware that the answer had become the opportunity for its own story. “It is no curse nor blessing. No different than the change of seasons or the leaves that bud and green and grow and brown and fall. In early summer it may seem that foliage had always been and always will be, and yet we know that time will come when the leaves will die and the branches be laid bare.”
“This is no leaf,” a woman murmured, eyes uneasily on the rock and her body curled over a nursing infant.
Several other women fidgeted and darted glances at the sunny meadow at the shelter’s side.
The Sage sighed. Panic tended to have its fingers intertwined with knowledge. She knew it better than most.
“Life requires faith,” she said. “Every person who ever took shelter under this place of magic — from the first ancestors to the persons sitting here today — accepted that it is not of our doing. Whether by the Angel Bird or a different magic, this marvel means that our people do not suffer in the rain or ice or burning sun. We did not build this. It is our home but we do not own it. The most we can do is ensure we keep it well and are not the ones to destroy it.”
For Sue Vincent’s WritePhoto prompt
Photo: Amitai Asif
One man.
One sail.
One boat.
One day.
The rock of waves
Holding a sway,
He grasps the bar
Through misty spray,
As mountains loom
In white and gray.
For Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: One
tucked away in the mountains
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