Not Closed

For De’s Quadrille Prompt over at dVerse Poets Pub and for Positive Prompted Poetry.  The word for today is “closed”.

 

Not Closed
“The first blooms of spring always make my heart sing.” — S. Brown

small business and restaurants
are closed – as is schools
government offices.
I walk around the neighborhood
and smile.
Not closed is the blue sky over head
and the dogwood trees,
the birds singing,
small yellow butterflies
hovering over dandelions.
lilacs bloom –
Spring is open!

Spring Comes

An American Sentence for dVerse Poets Open Link.  Spring comes under the full worm moon!

Spring Comes
“The deep roots never doubt spring will come.” By Rebekah Lowin

The east wind blows across the new grass and peepers sing down at the creek.

The Daffodils on the Edge of the Woods

For Posery at dVerse and Earthweal: Finding Hope

Haibun: The Daffodils on the Edge of the Woods
“She turned to the sunlight And shook her yellow head, And whispered to her neighbor: “Winter is dead.”
― A.A. Milne, When We Were Very Young

We bought our house and moved in in October. We planted daffodils all around the house. In the spring they burst into bloom and trumpeted spring. I noticed across the road, a bunch of wild daffodils, growing on their own. They splayed their greenness, displayed their golden heads among the dead leaves and bare trees. They became my favorite clump of daffodils and I looked forward to them every year. This year, they are growing, blooming. I saw them as I drove past on the narrow road by our house. I stopped and admired them. I began to cry to as I looked at them – the clump of a half-dozen blooms. I looked up at the spring blue sky with mackerel clouds. As much as I missed Brad, there was hope there. The sky would be blue, the daffodils would bloom, the birds would sing in the trees. There are moments caught between heart-beats, between tears and smiles. I wiped my eyes and bent down and kissed the blooms. Hope, I whispered. Hope.
trumpets of gold
proclaim spring –
proclaim life

The Swallow

A 55 for Kerry’s Art Prompt at Toads. She offers us Seamstress by Cat Schappach who has given us permission to use her image.

 

Seamstress
@catschappach

The Swallow
“The world of men is dreaming, it has gone mad in its sleep, and a snake is strangling it, but it can’t wake up.” –
D. H. Lawrence

part Medusa,
part mother –
pieces of animals sewn to herself.
she is the sewer of clothes
so the wealthy can garb themselves.
she is the symbol in our dreams
of how we wish to appear to the world.
she sits in the midst of spring
bringing forth snakes.
she is the swallow
flying away home.

symbols taken from Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress: by Dai Sijie (Author), Ina Rilke (Translator)

Kuroi to Suzume

Today is Tuesday Platform at Real Toads – we can post one poem of our choice. Rommy has told us of how she and her husband met and are celebrating 23 years of marriage! She is asking what interests drew us to our lovers/husbands/spouses/mates? I was 25 when I met my Black Dragon, my Japanese lover. He was 35 and a forensic pathologist and instructor in Kendo and kantana. I am of course interested in all things Japan and have been since I was six. I have visited Japan many times and at several points, followed in Basho’s footsteps. My lover taught me the culture, the history, the language of his country, honoring the changing seasons. We were together 10 years and visited several times his home in the mountains, Hakone, and then he returned to Japan. I did not go with him. I always thought of him as Black Dragon – kuroi ryu and myself as a sparrow beside him – suzume. This haibun is an old one and one I have shortened and reworked for future publication.  I follow the classic form which means it is non-fiction rather than made up. I hope you all enjoy.  The first full moon is of course the first full moon that appears in early spring – mangetsu no haru.

Black dragon and Sparrow
“Come, let me show you” – Indeed the spring moon was full and lit the yard Like a klieg. Although in jeans and tee shirt, he still looked lethal and royal and somehow the katana and wakazashi tucked into the makeshift obi around his waist did not look ridiculous. Hands arm and dry, he took my hand and pulled me outside into his yard – “such tiny hands you have” and he smiled his singularly sweet smile down at me. In the gravel place, between the pond for his nishikigoi and the karesansui, he pulled me. Always when he touched me, heat and electricity flowed from my heels to the top of my head, always drawing me closer to him. The song of steel as he pulled the katana clear – the sound to my ears like the sound the scales of a dragon would make as it moved across the earth.
Standing behind me his arms enclosed me and he placed the sword in my hands – like this and wrapped my hands around the hilt and now, hold it like this as he moved my arms into position and corrected my stance and how I held the sword. Move with me…awkward at first and then like magic it seemed, I was moving with him. Beneath that huge moon the black dragon and the sparrow began their dance. The moon drawing us together, warmed by each other, our breaths frosted in the cold of an early spring night. We could not move from that place. The earth held us captive as the moonlight pinned us in place. Who knew that gravity was heat and electricity? Who knew that gravity was choosing not to move, to stay suspended in one place?

spring night warmed
only by the first full moon –
tides and lovers rise

Haibun: The Time of Hummingbirds

Today the haibun prompt is by Bjorn.  He asks us to describe one of our walks or walking.  This is posted at dVerse.

The Time of Hummingbirds
My daily walk covers the same territory but the view is never the same. Snow falls, sleet peppers me, sun bakes me, spring alternately chills me or makes me sweat. Birds fly singly or in droves, hawks circle overhead, snakes cross the path in front of me, the neighbor’s dog sometimes follows me. The grass is deep green or tender new yellow green or brown from winter’s cold. As I walk I talk to myself or I silently compose a poem inside my head. Yesterday I talked to my mother, dead since June. Mostly I am silent, listening to the sounds of the changing seasons. Many times I cut my walk short to climb my favorite tree and to sit – on top of the world! Yesterday I found a tiny rock shaped like an egg. I put it into my pocket pretending it was a hummingbird egg. Today when I came home from my walk, I discovered a tiny brown young brown hummingbird sitting in one of the azaleas. He flew off immediately but I knew the time of hummingbirds had come. I went inside and filled several feeders to hang.
hummingbirds have arrived –
it is still cold at night –
but still we survive

Beach

A micropoem for Today’s prompt at Real Toads, day 19 of the Nanasomething. Sanaa has given us several word lists from which to choose to make a poem. I chose the list with blue, mouth, sensual, features.  I chose a micropoem ’cause I didn’t want to scare Shay with a haiku!

Beach
the dominant blue sea
opens its mouth and sensually
licks the features of
a submissive beach

The Moon in my Yard

Today at ReaL Toads, #30 in 30, Sanaa is giving us the The A L’ Arora, a form created by Laura Lamarca consists of eight lined stanzas. The rhyme scheme is a, b, c, d, e, f, g, f with no syllable count per line and the minimum length for the poem is 4 stanzas with no maximum length stipulation. You can also opt to write one or two stanzas in case you find the length a bit overwhelming. I chose two stanzas hoping to keep this short.

The Moon in my Yard
My yard is bathed in cold silver light,
the moon looks down at me, I look back.
Sitting on my steps I watch ragged clouds ghost
across its cold face.
In daylight, clusters of wisteria hang in
fragrant fountains of lavender.
Tonight in moonlight, they are white shrouds
hanging limp and torn.

No full moon madness here.
Only melancholy sighs and empty musings.
What was is vanished.
Whited out by moonlight, colored dreams
morph into pale wraiths
of what was and is no more,
what is and nothing more.
Truth and cold light.

fair use

Blue Egg Sky

Kim is prompting us for the Quadrille at dVerse today. What is a quadrille? It is a poetry form unique to dVerse Poets Pub – excluding the title the poem must consist of exactly 44 words and use the prompted word. Kim has given us the delightful word – egg. Come join us.  I am also posting this on Real Toads.

Blue Egg Sky
Blue as the eggs of a blackbird
Or catbird the sky cracked open
and poured out spring.
yellow yolk of sun swirled itself
in the blue – a cracked egg of joy –
these birds lived and sang
and flew up into
white albumen clouds

stock photo

 

Haiku 03/07/2018

spring wind comes blowing
tossing sparrows to the sky –
wind bells clang loudly

Haibun: No Ko Me

Today Victoria is prompting us for the Monday Haibun.  A haibun is a Japanese poetic form mixing prose and haiku.  It must be true and is usually written in the first person.  Today her prompt is:  No Ko Me—Tree Buds or something pending.  Come join us for this beautiful and seasonal prompt.

copyright kanzen sakura

No Ko Me
My ex-lover and I always marked the changing seasons as the Japanese do; but he was Japanese so there you go. As a Southern white girl, I always made note of the seasons, usually by smell: the freshly cut grass of summer, the snow scent of winter, the autumn leaves’ must, and of course, the fresh smell of tender buds of spring. Masashi taught me much more – the tens of thousands of kigo relating to the changing seasons and about mujo – change.

Around mid-February we would inspect the trees and shrubs on our property seeking out the most infinitesimal of growing buds which sprinkled the branches like individual dark red snowflakes. We knew that first spring was soon to be here. The buds would grow bigger until they would burst forth into bloom. A flower here, there, and soon second spring there would be flowers everywhere.

I would delicately touch the tree buds or gently kiss them soothing their pain. He told me the buds felt pain at growing large and then giving birth to flowers and leaves just as a woman felt pain at giving birth. In the rain I would imagine the buds weeping with pain but then the joy when the flower would unfold. I would stand beneath our cherry trees as the petals would fall to the ground – children that only lived for a day.

pain of tree buds
birthing into flowers –
petals fall – drops of blood

flowering quince copyright kanzensakura

 

 

Words Fail

 

For Poet’s United, Midweek Motif.  Sumana has the prompt which is words.

Words Fail

“Actions speak louder than words” – old proverb

Words –
A poor way to communicate.
How often words are taken amiss –
to cause anger, make glad, cause tears,
a different language sounds like gibberish –
reduce one to helpless snorts and guffaws.

the touch of a gentle hand upon one’s shoulder
a smile, a frown, the rolling of the eyes,
lips pursed or a blush –
the wind through the trees
the soft peep of peepers down at the creek
on a warm summer night
or the hooting of an owl
in a crystal night with a sky full of stars
in the depths of a cold winter night…
the things that speak to the soul
rather than to the ears –
Words.
Words can fail.