World slips away, hands-free sailing the seas. Unbroken expanse lulls calm into being. Softly undulating waves stretch from ship’s edge to straight line – where pastel blue sky caps azure blue waters. Sparse, feather-edged clouds gently smudge the scene. My mind, my body, sigh in unison. I wish this peace for everyone.
Up earlier than most, I so enjoy sitting in a quiet space with a cup of coffee, contemplating the vast calm ocean before me. It is my muse this morning.By the time I took this photo, the scene had shifted a bit – but still it’s a quiet calming for me.
She lives her life as a barnacle would, clinging tenaciously to existence. A recluse without the vanities and banalities of everyday life. She escapes it all, lives in the far reaches of Cape Cod’s shifting dunes.
It is said she journals each day. Pecks words into being on an old Smith Corona, sounding every bit like gulls pecking again and again at stubborn crustacean shells. She imagines a kind of Victorian love, creating a lover of her design.
Humpback whales serenade her from the depths of Stellwagen Banks. Red fox slink past her, pay their respects with nary a sound. All maintain her privacy, be she substance of spirit or legend of yore.
Should you walk the beaches, search the National Seashore’s length in sunlight or by the path of a glistening moon, you shall never find her. She is known as the Lady of the Dunes to all who live on this spit of land.
She floats amidst the salted winds companion to the ocean’s ebb and flow. She is the past, the present and the future. She is the one who comforts Portuguese fishermen. Those brave men who disappeared many years ago as ships went down and women wailed.
She is the forever inhabitant of this land called Cape Cod.
Image from Pixabay.comI must admit poetic license here – the Lady of the Dunes legend is my creation
Written to share at OLN LIVE which will meet Saturday morning, April 22nd, from 10 to 11 AM EST. Come to https://dversepoets.com to find the link which will take you to a live session of poets from around the globe as they share a poem of their choice. Come to read a poem of your own, or just to listen. We’re a friendly bunch!
Take my hand. Travel with me through starry starry nights to a new place not yet discovered. Not yet befouled by humanity, but still palpable in its existence.
Happiness, serenity, joy, jubilation, celebration, exuberance good works and caring, and most importantly, optimism shall color this world.
All peoples dwelling here shall live within the light. None shall be unseen, unheard, besmirched, assigned to the shadows. If I were to paint this place . . .
it would be spills of pastels and primary hues beginning at the bottom of the canvas and rising until they meld into a crescendo of love.
If you take my hand this day, this hour this moment to embark upon this journey, might others join our endeavor?
Can it only be achieved on a small scale, two people within a cocoon?
Or can we gather together creative spirits of master artists from centuries past? Might they join today’s artists and somehow . . .
paint our dreams into a reality . . . into a place of life and joy and hope for you and me . . . and for the many.
Written for dVerse, the virtual pub for poets around the globe.
I’m hosting OLN LIVE at dVerse on Thursday from 3 to 4 PM EST and again on Saturday from 10 to 11 AM EST.
It’s an opportunity to join us via video and audio, to read a poem of your choice and listen as others do the same. OR, just come to sit in if you prefer.
Go to https://dversepoets.com beginning at 3 PM Thursday, EST, and you’ll find a link for Thursday’s LIVE session and one for Saturday – just click on the link and you’ll be with us LIVE!
Image is of course, Starry Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh and is in public domain.
Do not come round me with doom and gloom, tales of burnt toast, Trumpian despair, woe-is-me whines about this country. I desperately want instead, to believe happiness lives.
Let us walk outside. Look for children skipping rope, sharing colored chalk, drawing sidewalk art that regales the urban streets. Let us look for smiles.
You do know we can vote? We can demonstrate. We can share our thoughts in poetry and blogs, letters and chats with our neighbors. We can choose to spread the good.
When you come to visit me, bring into my home a jubilant spirit. In return, I shall give you a welcome gift, bundles of daffodils tied in crimson ribbons. Can you see the joyfulness in that? Together, we can concentrate on hope.
Written for dVerse the virtual pub for poets around the globe. Today Sanaa is hosting, offering up a new poetic form for us to consider called Line Messaging. “Line messaging is a poetry form created by Angel Favazza where the poet seeks to utilize the last line of each stanza to bring forth and represent an idea, a thought and notion . . . the last line of each stanza, when read separately from the poem, should deliver an independent messsage or be a poem all on its own.”
Thus the last lines of each stanza above create the following much shorter poem: Hope Lives:
To believe happiness lives let us look for smiles. We can choose to spread the good. Together, we can concentrate on hope.
Gustav, cloak me in yellow. My golden mantle shimmers as does my heart in your embrace. Your mouth meets mine, a kiss divine.
Surround me in yellow, Vincent. Bouquet me with sunflowers. Run beside me round yeasty haystacks. Worry not my darling, your works shall be loved
Dazzle me in yellow, William. Ease my loneliness, wander with me beneath cumulus clouds. Dance with me, as daffodils do, waving brightly in the hills we climb.
Someone, please, mesmerize us with yellow. Glaze our eyes in sunshine. Brush merriment into wildflower scenes. Blend colors into happiness upon your palette. Make this world a wondrous place.
Written for dVerse, the virtual pub for poets around the globe. Today Sarah asks us to consider the color yellow. My poem references The Kiss by Gustav Klimt; Sunflowers and Haystacks, both paintings by Vincent Van Gogh; and the poem Daffodils by William Wordsworth.
Art work images are in public domain. Daffodils image from Pixabay.com
Jane Montgomery sat on the wicker chair. What a wonderful day she’d had! The beginning of her summer retreat on Nantucket, away from hectic city life, publisher’s demands, her acrimonious divorce settlement. She chose this out-of-the-way cottage deliberately. Walking to the secluded beach this morning, was like salve on her bruised psyche.
He was sitting on the sand, nuzzling his border collie, staring out at the waves. She tentatively stopped to say hello. Maybe it was the magic of this island, or the romance novels she’d read in her 20s about this place, but they ended up spending the day together. He was here for the summer too.
She picked up her journal, pen in hand, and thoughtfully began writing her first Nantucket entry. The seed of a poem lay dormant in my heart, . . . She stopped, sipped her cold chardonnay, smiled, and continued writing.
Written for dVerse, the virtual pub for poets around the globe. It’s Prosery Monday – a unique form of writing developed here at dVerse. Writers are given one line from a poem to include in a piece of prose exactly 144 words in length. The line must be used word for word, exactly as given. To be clear, we are not to write a poem. We are to write prose, generally flash fiction.
Today Mish is hosting and gives us the line “The seed of a poem lay dormant in my heart.” The line is from the poem Winged Words by Valsa George.
There is good in the world, I remind myself collecting my thoughts. In morgues across this country body bags, small and large. In churches and theaters, in schools and grocery stores, automatic military assault weapons kill. To concentrate on the good, sometimes difficult. Scattered thoughts.
Scattered thoughts. Sometimes difficult to concentrate on the good. Automatic military assault weapons kill in schools and grocery stores, in churches and theaters. Body bags, small and large, in morgues across this country. Collecting my thoughts I remind myself, there is good in the world.
Written for dVerse, the virtual pub for poets around the globe. Today Laura asks us to consider “cleaving to antonyms”. One method she suggests is to write a Reverso poem: same words read backwards and forwards, making poetic sense. She also asks us to choose a pair of antonyms from a list she provides, to include in our poem(s). I chose scatter and collect.
Today, in 2023, politicians and the NRA use the 2nd amendment, ratified in 1791, to justify private citizens owning military assault weapons. Do you think our founding fathers could even fathom the power of an AK 47? Or want Mr. Joe Blow living in the cabin down the lane to own one? And Mr. Smith, three cabins away? And Mr. Jones, across the lily pad pond?
In the Newtown slaying at Sandy Hook Elementary School, twenty children were slaughtered in a matter of minutes. Bodies were so obliterated, in some cases shoes were used for early identification. Three nine-year olds were recently killed in Nashville. The state legislature in Tennessee will vote today to expel three Democrat representatives because they joined more than one thousand of their constituents, the people who elected them, on the statehouse grounds in a demonstration for gun control.
Yes, somedays, it’s hard to concentrate on the good. And there is a lot of it. But some days, with 24/7 news, it’s difficult. Politicians are concerned about taking race out of books about Rosa Parks; banning books in schools and in town libraries; forbidding girls in schools (or anyone in schools) to talk about menstruation/periods until sixth grade; want to deny children, until they are eighteen, any kind of counseling or medical help for gender issues; remove gender studies as a major in colleges and universities; outlaw drag shows; deny women any rights to their reproductive health including in some states, denial of abortions under any circumstances or, in the news yesterday, after six weeks of pregnancy.
And we have mass shootings every week it seems.
So there you have it: a message read forwards or backwards. Anyway you look at it, it gets more and more difficult these days to concentrate on the good.
Apologies for the rant today – dear Glenn would understand. I miss him.
Coral flamboyance, long legs and necks, all squawking. Flamingo mosh pit.
Written for Tuesday Poetics at dVerse, the virtual pub for poets around the globe. Today Lisa provides a choice of three specific prompts, all with reference to animals. I chose the option to write about an animal, considering its nature.
A group of flamingoes is called a flamboyance. There is a metaphorical allusion here….might be more clear if flamingoes were orange….or if while madly cackling and squawking they wore red baseball hats.
grey skies droop, shroud skyscrapers and urban neighborhoods. Red breasted robin pecks through dirty pebbled remains of once tall snow piles. Crocus greenery marks the shift, competes for first-sign-of-spring prize. Less competitive blooms await winter’s total demise. Flannel clad, I snooze, book close by.
Written for dVerse, the virutal pub for poets around the globe. Today, Mish asks us to use the word “shift” or a form of the word within the body of our quadrille, a poem of exactly 44 words sans title.
I was not there, the day everything changed. When was that? When World War II ended? When Einstein discovered relativity? When nine-eleven crashed into infamy?
Or when Harry really met Sally? Or when you simply ate a peach that summer day, juice deliciously dripping down your tanned wrist. Somewhere at that moment, I suppose a child was born.
Truth is, everything changes with every breath we take. Every pivot, every spin, every loping run, something new becomes.
Nothing stands still. Except perhaps sentinel mountains in the Norwegian fjords. Yet even they are marred by subtle granular shifts as we gaze up at their rugged rockface surface.
Like when we turned around and our children became adults. We noticed when their braces came off that summer, but we didn’t register the daily shifts.
I don’t understand my image in the mirror. I know it’s me. But how did it become . . . that? Wasn’t it just yesterday, I was a brunette and you introduced yourself to me?
Fifty-seven years later, we walk more slowly, still hand in hand more often than not. We’ve passed through so many seasons together, the path is now longer behind than in front.
And so my love, in this moment that shall also pass by all too quickly, I simply must tell you. I am thankful for every day. I am thankful for you.
Written to share with dVerse, the virtual pub for poets around the globe.
Saturday, March 18, dVerse will go LIVE with audio and video from 10 to 11 AM EST.
Folks from across the globe will meet face-to-face via Google Meet to read a poem of their choosing, and to visit across the miles.
lillian the home poet