To Heal Dry Ground

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Ground too long left dry

Grows hard and brittle,

Shrinks and breaks,

And crumbles from the cracks

To dust that trembles at a breath

And when it’s in those fragments

Sometimes true and driving rain

Can only scar:

The rushing battery

Will drive the pieces, crushed, away.

But water that, in deluge,

Might sweep over broken ground

And leave it torn,

Scraped bare, still dry,

And yet more wounded in its wake

May hover in a mist,

Fall lightly, hover – slowly see

The clods grow dark,

The cracks grow close

With healing softening.

Even’s Swell

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The ebbing light pools to aqua shallows in the west,

And casts the clouds through dusty lavenders to depths of gray,

But wispy-fingered mists still reach to grasp the glow and hold it,

Lighting briefly to a burnished shine

          ‘Fore cooling to a softened steel

                     As the fire slips past and flows away.

Then the smoldering brightness draws together

Sending forth its last farewell.

The chill of depths creeps in behind it

O’er-flowing it in even’s swell.

Making

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Mommy had it out!  She had it out; it was time!  I jumped and clapped my hands and ran over to the couch where she had set out the fabric for my dress.  “You’re making it for me, Mommy?  You’re making my big four-year-old dress now?”  I grabbed for the fabric and pulled it down so that fell open and over to the floor.  All those little purple flowers would be on my dress!  As I looked at my fabric flowers hanging down to the floor, I wrapped the part at the top around my hands, because it felt nice and cool when it touched them.

“Now where did my sewing scissors go?  What do you think, Melody, did Daddy take them again?”  I looked up to see Mommy turning around from her cabinet.  “I’ll go see, and then we’ll get started, okay?” Continue reading →

A Walk Through Reflections

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It feels like there should be a story in all of this.

I walk along, looking down, thinking.  It’s wet today.  Bare tree branches and patches of mottled gray sky glimmer up at me from between grass blades and shine out of the pavement blackness.  They draw my eyes as though into another world – into the muted, fading new colors and the vast expanse of clouds.  And then- all of that crisp, clear existence cuts off abruptly against an edge, dissolving into submerged ice and green and long-dead leaves.  I somehow find myself surprised.

It’s that other world – that feeling of a story.  Except the story is missing: a story-feel without a story.  So what is the story to go with the feel? Continue reading →

Searching for Marplies

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It’s not often that you crawl back into that unused corner of the attic and find a civilization of marplies, or a kilargy kingdom, or a trivith triad.  And I can’t help but think that’s a pity, because there are times when I’d like to, especially on boring, rainy afternoons.  I know, of course, that it can’t be helped – if things don’t exist, I suppose there’s nothing they can do about it.  I can always wish they’d try, but I do understand.

If they will insist on not existing, though, it would be nice if they’d at least stop teasing me.

Like the time I was hunting in my closet for my other shoe (I usually am hunting somewhere for my other shoe).  Continue reading →

Swallow Dance

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They sweep, a-dance, a trio
Swooping wildly o’er the water,
Darting wingtips washed by wavelets
In the swerving, swirling chase.

They soar, they dive, they rise,
Gliding up above the shoreline
Showing black against a skyline
Soft with opal-gleam pastels.

They hover over color –
Pink and purple, greenish-blue
In a fragment-mix of motion
As the wavelets chase the sheen.

Then again, against the cloud-light –
Coral, blue-green, lilac-gray;
They trace a tie between the two
While weaving lace-paths with their ways.

Of Spiderwebs

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Shimmering silken strands
Shivering, shining in a sunbeam
That slips through shaded boughs
And streams to spot the grass below –

A thousand quivering strings of glimmering
Catching, stretching out the glitterings,
Tracing rough and darkened branches
White with lacy lengths of glow –

What are these but plain and ugly things,
So many spiderwebs ‘mong branchings
Of a single, simple pine tree
That weeps sap-tears to the ground?

Yet they become much more than just themselves:
When o’re-washed with bright cascading,
Clothed a-new with light’s remaking
They’re transformed and glorified.

The Signpost

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I traveled through a windswept waste

Wide weary, dreary-hued and beauty-bare,

When in that bitter, lonely place

A form arrested, held my stare.

It rose to just above my height –

A pole with battered board atop

That shivered in the biting wind

But bade me, even still, to stop

And gaze in hunger at its face:

Wood scarred with etchings deep and old

That spoke in silence of that place…

Drove out its harsh and empty cold.

At last I turned back to the waste

But knew now that I tread upon

A path another soul had faced

And passed. I could continue on.

Fantasy Realm

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New-green, the hills,

All speckle-swirled with white,

Stretch ‘round to bask

In glowing sun’s delight

And duck through woods

Of shadow tossed by trees

That tow’r aloft

To catch the laughing breeze

Which dives to whirl

Through flower-galaxies

A-drape, lace-white,

O’er swells of grass-space green

And, twirling, sets

The starlet flowers a-dance

To toss the world

Their wonder-blushing glance.

Stream

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White of clouds in day-blue sky
O’er-traced with criss-crossed, branching lace,
Set wav’ring on the water’s streaming rush
To yet another place –

Sand and rocks all browned with moss
And tiny pebbles littered ‘round,
Sealed in by mirk-fogged liquid that
Slips ever past without a sound –

Oh, which to see?  Could the world within
This wet, thin-layered atmosphere
Negate the glimmer-hinted realm
That far beyond its depths appears?