(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
(Photo: Dustin Humes on Unsplash)
She knew when she opened the window
That day
That it would be
One
For the way.
The frost on the petals
The chill in the air
The way that stray branches
Scraped against the stair.
The breath of new winter
Kissing her hair.
For the dVerse quadrille challenge: Way
She rose with the sun, her brow still damp with the essence of dream. Soon enough her feet were, too, from dew and from the small drops of silence that mornings bring.
There was little to say, and much space to accompany.
It was a good day.
It had to be.
There will be time much later on, for all the things she might still need, and all the words she may still say, and all the sorrows she no longer wished to borrow.
In the meanwhile, she walked on, crushing dandelions, breathing lavender.
The fields stretched ahead as the disc of light leaned hot against the sky. The air shimmered, dancing in the sun.
Or wavering.
It would not matter, in the long run.
She walked on.
Eventually she’d have to turn around, retrace her steps, return into the pace of tending, bending, sending, lending, fending.
And it would still be a good day.
For the dawn poured the generous morn into her, washing her, filling her, scenting her soul. Step by breath by step by breath, immersed into the longest walk her present moment could recall.
Photo: Hadera, Israel
The bus rumbled on the narrow road, slow behind the loaded tractor wagon. A mix of diesel fumes, damp earth, and faint notes of orange blossoms wafted through the open crack in the heavy window.
They were going to be late. Again.
She sighed and glanced at her youngest sister, automatically feeling for the change-of-uniform she carried at the bottom of her school bag for the eventuality that her sister’s car-sickness would get the upper hand.
Across the narrow aisle, a woman coughed wetly into a handkerchief and shifted the plastic baskets that crowded the small space under her feet. Those will be packed full on the ride back from Hadera, their area’s shopping center and nearest ‘big’ town.
Finally, past Gan-Shmuel, the snailing tractor turned into a field and the bus picked up speed. Houses marked the city’s boundaries. She nudged her other sister awake. “We’re getting off soon.”
For What Pegman Saw: Hadera, Israel
Note: Depicting a very true (almost daily) childhood memory …
Photo: Na’ama Yehuda
Still
The promise of day sweeps
Broad calm in its sway,
And the sun,
Rising gold
Lights new stories
Untold.
For the Sunday Stills Photo Challenge: Early
Photo: Hasan Almasi on Unsplash
I wake and turn my back on the clock and seek the comfort of the dream that is still floating like a bubble, already fragile, above my head. It pops and disappears and there is nothing but a vague sense of something lost. I wanted to go back into it … and yet the choice, when it was made in some subterranean neurological net within my mind, was that sleep was to escape.
The day to unfold.
Still, and throughout the mundane tasks of morning, small search-parties like tentative roots into hard-packed sand, send shoots into my consciousness to try and capture whiffs of the dream. A hope that perhaps a fleeting dandelion seed of recollection will find purchase and regrow a stalk.
A place of in-between. Perhaps a corner of my mind is still in slumber. Perhaps if I find it, I will come across the dream, robust in puffy bubble-hood, still tethered to my insides, waiting to be seen.
Sometimes writing helps.
I have too much to do.
I will ignore.
Will choose to sit and breathe and let my mind and fingers wander where they may, the sands of time, the depths of grief, the dawns of days, the fluttering delights, the warmth of recognition, the sorrows of injustice. Currents of discovery of what’s already there. A sea of tethered bubbles like a field of hot-air balloons, straining at the anchors to let loose.
I wrote of a blimp just the day before.
Was that the origin or the reaction to the imagery of bobbing thoughts and fullness so tangible it turns air into rising power? Was the blimp the source or the reflection of the fragility of any skin if pulled too tight, of the leaking deflation if seams are untended, the world upended as it spirals out of flight?
I write. I breathe.
I look pointedly away from the pink sticky notes and the open documents holding forms awaiting filling for a speaking engagement and another for an upcoming presentation and a list of emails needing a response.
I make a choice.
To chase a dandelion.
For Linda Hill’s SoCS Challenge: Choices
Photo: Philip Coons
And the mist rose
From the falls
In morning light
And autumn glow,
Steaming like the
Cold air’s breath
Out of water’s
Yawning edge.
For the Tuesday Photo Challenge: Mist
The snow fell softly in the early hours, blanketing a brittle frost with a bridal veil.
She undid the entrance flap and shivered in the chill. Her thin underclothing was not sufficient for the cold. She retreated back into the shelter to don her clothes, lace her cloak, and pull on her boots.
Still when she emerged from the tent, her breath caught in the frigid air. She welcomed it. She needed her wits about her, today more than most.
Her feet crunched over the frozen ground as she hurried to relieve herself by a nearby tree. The warmth leaving her body felt palpable. In it there was relief and wariness, both.
She did not fold the tent but she did not know if she’d return to it. What she did not carry along might not be seen again … and she would not be carrying much. She was warned to bring naught but herself.
“You’d have no need for anything,” were the instructions.
The words could be ominous or comforting. She wasn’t sure which it was and she didn’t think she was meant to be certain about it. Or about anything.
There was some food left in her pack, but her stomach did not feel ready for any digesting. She drank some water instead. It tasted flat and smelled of the container it’s been in, but it would have to do. She didn’t know where water sources might be found and even if she saw some on the path she didn’t think she’d be able to avail herself of any.
She shuddered again. Of fear. Of cold. Of worry. Of expectation. Of trepidation. Of all of the above.
It will be what it will. She had little choice now. She’d given her word, and what follows was not for her to decide on anymore.
She turned her back to the tent and began counting paces. The location for her tent had been marked. The one thousand steps were to be taken away from it, with the rising sun at her back.
She mouthed the numbers, ignoring the breeze as it tunneled under her cloak, the errant twigs that grabbed hold of her hood and deposited wet fluffs of snow on her hair, down the nape of her neck, on her back. No one had said what will happen if she lost count. She did not intend to find out.
The steps became a meditation of intent and tunnel vision. The world receded into the yard immediately ahead. Then the next. Then the next.
Nine hundred ninety nine, she breathed.
“Turn around.”
She jumped. The sound came from the space her body had just vacated.
She turned only to be blinded by the sun’s glare, rising through the narrow branches of a sapling. The light speared her.
When she finally adjusted, she was elsewhere. The forest was no more. The world as she’d known it, gone.
Photo: Na’ama Yehuda
Soft ripples spread
Like ribbons of
Silk
As morning heads
Toward shimmering
Heat.
Note: The photo was taken in Ko Samui, Thailand, on an August morning. It was sublime.
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
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