Relationships

Will you . . .

lillian66 Comments

curl me softly?
Straight lines do not appeal,
nor pointillist detail.

Giverny blur me
in weeping willow,
mauve wisteria and lupine tendrils.

Soften words with lyrical strokes
lightly touch my lips,
whisper quietly in fading sun.

Hold me,
spoon me
in waning silvered moon.

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Welcome back to dVerse! Bjorn opens 2017 with the quadrille prompt to use the word “curl.”  dVerse, the virtual pub for poets, opens at 3 PM…come join us…curl up with a cup of coffee or a mimosa, share your take on the word and or read what others have to share in only 44 words (definition of a quadrille)!

Yuletide Carol, 2016

lillian49 Comments

In the quiet spaces
my heart awaits a miracle.

A family with no home
carrying a gift within,
sought shelter on the darkest of nights.
Turned away,
their solace lay with stable mates
and a symbol of Love was born.

As the world seethes
a baby in Aleppo writhes with pain,
feels not the love promised to many.
Angels hover,
ethereal wings tattered and torn.
Their yuletide song has but six words.

How has it come to this?

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Created for dVerse, the virtual pub for poets.  dVerse will take a holiday hiatus, but I shall keep posting here.  Heads up! Tomorrow’s post is about our recent trip to Australia and includes some amazing photos of a mama wallaby and her joey!

Special thanks to Bjorn, Gail and all my fellow pub tenders. And a very special thanks to all dVerse participants for making 2016 a great year! 

she waits . . .

lillian46 Comments

elusive time
slips through fingers
like threads of gossamer silk

elusive time
disappears like dew drops
as sun steeps blades of grass

elusive
as sheaves of journal pages
covered in faded ink,
tear drop stains
softened by the years

journal pages
fingered tentatively
as she sits, mind wandering,
wizened body ensconced
in pale grey prayer shawl

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I’m hosting the bar at dVerse today, a virtual pub for poets, and asking folks to write a poem with the word “time” in it; or a poem about a particular time etched in their memory. Bar opens at 3 PM Boston time. Stop by and imbibe some poetic words or take up the prompt yourself. We’d love to have you! Photo credit: Kristen Hultzapple.

Original Sin

lillian54 Comments

Proud anthems hide painful histories.
Call them Scar Face, the original mobs.

Maori treaties disemboweled.
Aborigine beliefs purged, land seized,
lives stolen by small pox scourge.
Wounded Knee cut beyond the pale.

Revisionist history.
Frayed band-aids cover festering wounds.
Moans for restitution reverberate.

A Quadrille (poem of 44 words) using the word “scar” for dVerse where De is tending bar at this virtual pub for poets today. Photos are from our recent trip to Australia and New Zealand. In New Zealand, Europeans came to settle and discovered the Maori people — they were of Polynesian descent. Treaties were signed that ultimately displaced the Maori. However, in recent years New Zealand has done much to rectify the situation including a formal apology, declaring English and Maori as the two official languages of NZ, giving back some key lands, having both languages taught in the first years of school. There are Maori television stations. The video is of a beautiful Maori dance on the land, given back to the Maori’s, where the original treaties were signed. A beautiful museum just opened there this year.

Second set of pictures are from an Aboriginal tour we took of the Botanical Gardens in Sydney. This man is Aboriginal (mixed marriage) and showed us many of the plants and trees used by the Aboriginee for food and shelter, and explained their difficult history. Because Aboriginees no longer have easy access to their natural foods of years ago, they now eat “normal” food and their bodies have never adjusted…the average age of an Aboriginal male is just 65. Kidney disease and diabetes are rampant in the population. The artwork is some from the garden and one bark drawing from a beautiful display at the New South Wales Art Gallery. The Aboriginees have not fared as well as the Maori in New Zealand.

And of course, the wonded knee reference is to the Massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890 when US federal troops killed 150+ native American Indians. In the U.S., the plight of the American Indian, on reservations, high alcoholism, education access etc.  In all three countries, we sing our national anthems proudly, but our countries are established on the “original sin” of taking the land away from those who were our countrie’s first inhabitants. It is a fact of our histories. This recent trip gave me much food for thought concerning history and indigenous peoples.

Quadrille Times Three

lillian65 Comments

she-devil                                                     lived recklessly
among subhuman rats                           star on knees, alley squatter
throwing die, rolling kraps                   spark of luck in fingertips
collecting just desserts                          stressed, on edge
come on baby, deliver                             reviled by all who play her game

debutante of junkies, she’s lost it all.

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Read three ways, always using the “debutante” line as the final line: 1. poem on left; 2. poem on right; 3. from left to right, all the way across as one poem.  Also uses semordnilap: one word, when spelled backwards makes a different word:  devil is lived; rats is star; kraps is spark; desserts is stressed; and deliver is reviled. Any way you read it, it is a Quadrille (44 words – no more, no less) that includes the word “spark” as asked for in today’s prompt at dVerse, the virtual pub for poets. De is opening the pub at 3 pm – come on over and write with us — or just imbibe the words of others!
Photo Credit: Michal Zacharzewski

The Escape

lillian31 Comments

Threatening clouds blew cross once blue skies.
Dark, sinister, he stood incensed.
White-knuckled fist shoved in her face,
words flew like lightning bolts.
Slut. Idiot. Whore. Landing like blows,
so in sensed by her dulled brain, they chilled her soul,
like hoar frost on some distant trampled land.

But this time, she alone knew the secret she’d hid.
Just three small steps to that small new gun.
Her shaking hand pointed as he turned his head,
and the nightmare was over.
This knight in shining armor crap,
dead.

And so she took his keys.
Rode down back roads, kicking up dust,
never looked back, only forward.
She’d find a place, somewhere,
with hope tinged clouds
in tomorrow’s dawn.

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Written for Tuesday’s Poetics at dVerse, a virtual pub for poets where today I’m tending bar, asking people to write a poem with at least two homophones. Homophones:  words with same sound but different spelling and different meaning. For example: two/too, and ball/bawl.  Homophones in The Escape include blue/blew, incensed/in sensed, whore/hoar frost, new/knew, nightmare/knight, rode/roads.  The trick in this prompt is to insure the “sense” of the poem, its flow and meaning are still the focus . The homophones need to fit in, rather than stick out boldly. Pub opens at 3 PM. Photo Credit: Linda Lucerne

Fanciful or Real?

lillian58 Comments

Hand in hand, with fairy grace,
 will we sing, and bless this place.
William Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night’s Dream

She fancied herself a fairy at an early age.
Each toddler step produced peels of laughter
from those who regaled in every teetering move.

She gathered smiles and tucked them away
behind sweet curly tendrils,
within folds of chubby knees,
in the sparkly depths of deep blue
behind delicate lashes with flutter dreams.

And as her steps grew wider, longer,
she skipped around the globe
passing out smiles to all she came upon,
turning darkness inside out
to light the path of many.

She was the first within a multitude,
if only we believe.

Feel their touch in sunbeams,
look within darkness and seek their starry light.
Gaze into delicate etchings of frost
upon our windows in the coldest of days,
and understand.

There are fairies and angels among us,
if only we believe.
And we can choose their ways,
light a path through darkness
and create smiles within the world.

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Welcome to Tuesday’s Poetics at dVerse, the virtual pub for poets. Today I’m tending bar and asking writers to kick up their heels a bit…..give me the ole razzle dazzle! Give us some sparkle! Think of the meaning of these words and either use one, two, all or none of the words while creating a poem that evokes their mood. Stop by to read the full prompt and see what others come up with. Come enjoy some razzle dazzle with us!

The Tear Drop

lillian40 Comments

i.
If you insist, turn a deaf ear.
Tear thread by thread
cherished maxims from the cloak of civility.
Ye shall find a skeleton of pock marked bones
bereft of tear drops, wallowing in dust.

ii.
Some denigrate her promise,
hurl angry words upon that ancient crown.
All who first sailed round her base, forgotten,
as the brazen would douse her torch of hope.
She stands sentinel ‘neath a sliver moon,
solitary tear drop rung from stone
frozen on sculpted cheek.

iii.
Violence rips across city streets
sirens scream and echo through news.
Voices raise, fists raise,
and mothers fall on knees.
Not one tear drop falls,
it is a deluge that turns spilled blood
into rivers of salted red.

iv.
A tear drop
is the same color,
no matter the skin.

statue-of-liberty-in-tears2-0
Bjorn is hosting dVerse today and uniquely is adapting the cubist movement in art to the art ofpoetry. He asks to to select a simple object, or common concept, and write several poems looking at it from different perpectives. Ultimately, we are to place the poems in an order to create contrasts and, when read together, form one poem.  Individual parts – also to be read as a whole.
I’ve chosen to write about the tear drop.

I am the Sins of Those Before Me

lillian45 Comments

They arrived in droves, valuable cargo.
Used for the well being of others
to plant and sow, shod our horses,
tend our fields and homes.

In their visibility they were anonymous.
They were bid upon and owned.
Free will shackled in irons,
inhumanity by humanity.

This is our history. Not sepia toned
nor romantically blurred by antiquity.
Not smudged as charcoal blends,
disappears into fine threads of vellum.

This is our history,
and I am ashamed.

Posted to dVerse where Bjorn is hosting OLN; opens at 3 PM Boston time.
No photo posted with this poem. Racism still lives and appears on nightly news. I crave the dream of Martin Luther King and pray for all our children, for a better, kinder, more just world.

 

Misplaced Egos

lillian43 Comments

The peacock struts slowly.
Picks up one foot
and then the other
as oglers crouch,
cameras and smart phones in hand,
waiting.

People peer through apertures,
fingers tensed to catch the shot.
And still the bird struts.
Guards its fan of iridescent blues and greens,
that myriad of non-iris eyes,
its feathered gloriosity.

The peacock stands proudly still
waiting for the peahen to appear,
not giving a whit for humanity.
Those gullible money-paying creatures
who think their presence
could be a reason for its preening.

stockvault-peacock122020

Today, Victoria is hosting dVerse, the virtual pub for poets, and asks us to consider feathers in our poems.  I’ve stood waiting, at zoos and nature parks across the U.S. and in Bermuda, waiting for a peacock to spread its glorious fan and have never, ever, seen it! Facts: the peacock is the male of the species and spreads its fan in a mating “dance/call” for the female. Only the males are peacocks. Females are peahens and quite dull colored. Peacock feathers in fan-form, emit a sound only heard by peahens. Peacocks can and do fly. And, perhaps the most fun fact: a group of peacocks is called an ostentation or a party. Photo Credit: Danny Ouellet.