flashes of silver
fish plash beneath clacking palms:
season of the fins
sweet budding branches:
brush back the flying darkness
comb through tangled stars
lavender shadows
ease across the evening sky:
waiting for the moon
Approaching Solstice
fingers of darkness curl and uncurl
around the dimming light
seeking to steal the stars
wide-eyed and speechless
ancestors linger
elongated
stretched beyond their capacity
to capture fleeing suns
taut as bowstrings
drawn across the dreaming land
they reach and rise
their wooden song grown graceful as the falling of the leaves
Comments are welcome. To leave a comment or respond, please click below.
Special thanks to Susan Scheid, whose photograph at “Dreaming in Swedish” gave rise to this poem.
Fire and Ice
A hundred shades of green flushing across the trees, an errant yellow daffodil, pink and white blossoming fruits – the colors of spring are as delicate as they are welcome. Little wonder, then, that a primary celebration of spring – the Christian festival of Easter – should be a season of pastels. Easter baskets, dyed eggs, little girls’ dresses, greeting cards and candies are awash in lilac and lemon, baby-cheek pink, soft peach and plum.
Even those who don’t celebrate Easter as a religious occasion enjoy the profusion of new life it heralds, the verdant growth and wash of color after the long, monotoned winter. It’s always fun to track the seasons as they saunter about the country and Spring is especially interesting, walking hand-in-hand as she does with a companion called “seasonal jealousy” – the anguished longing of still-snowbound folk forced to watch their more-southerly friends luxuriate in the rising warmth.
But spring is more complex than luscious color and delicate growth. A time of transition, it also brings destruction, the inevitable result of implacable, colliding forces. Winter refuses to yield. Spring will not be denied. Tornados, ice jams, flooding and hail result and become the breaking news of the day. This year, Texas added fire to the mix, a deadly consequence of the same extended drought which eliminated so many of the state’s celebrated bluebonnets.
With friends living both in Canada and across Texas’ drought-stricken plains, it’s been impossible not to think of this year’s spring as a season of fire and ice. Extraordinarily late thaws and extraordinarily early drought are a strange combination, one that evokes Robert Frost’s famous juxtaposition. (more…)
Waiting for Rain
“It’s the dust,” he said. “I can’t stand the damned dust.” And he couldn’t.
Moving around the house he dusted reflexively, compulsively, the dampened cloth swinging and swiping in defiance of the elements: dry and hot a personal affront, windy an insult, dusty a threat, a visceral reminder of those wretched days atop the Caprock when dust was not merely dust but a destroyer.
Even when the worst of the Dust Bowl had passed he absorbed the stories and with them the grief and the fear. Blowing sand stripping his uncle’s car of paint in less time than it takes now for the telling of it. His mother wedging damp towels into cracks around the windows and doors of the old house, wringing out excess water and re-wetting them with her tears. The neighbor caught out in the fast-moving storm, unable to see and disoriented, certain of death and burial by billowing, unconstrained dirt.
Even apocryphal stories rang true. No one could prove that a Panhandle priest fled back to Illinois after that awful Ash Wednesday service, fled to the valleys and verdant fields, the rivers and rain of his midwestern home. On the other hand, no one doubted it was possible. Priest or not, what man could stand to curse his neighbors, reminding them of their coming from dust and returning to dust even as the dust of destruction overtook their lives? (more…)
Evangeline Memories
For weeks I’ve watched my blogging friend Proserpina entice her readers into accepting a simple concept - color-based blogs - and encourage them to help create a rich and expressive tapestry of personal preference. “Here is a color,” she says. “Here are its qualities. Here are some references to it in history and the arts. Does it remind you of something? How do you feel about it? How has it decorated your life?”
Such simple questions, and yet the answers she receives build one upon another to form patterns of exquisite complexity. Readers contribute images of famous paintings, or their grandchild’s refrigerator art. They bring limericks and literature, poetry, personal photographs of beloved objects, memories from days of long-past travel and dreamscapes from journeys yet to come.
With each new color, discoveries are made. When Proserpina designated “Blue” as her first color, I was a bit disappointed. I’ve always considered blue to be my least favorite color and yet as images, videos and snippets of literature were posted, I realized ”blue” is too general a term. While I dislike the primary blue of the color wheel, powder blue baby blankets, navy blue and electric blue, I wear denim and covet turquoise jewelry. I’ve reveled in the azure, aqua and cerulean of Carribbean waters and will sit for hours watching the smokey indigo of disappearing sunsets. Clearly, there are distinctions to be made. (more…)
