memories

Color Their Love: cherished series, opus 10

lillian5 Comments

Their love never showed itself
in word or touch.
It simply travelled
through a colored atlas
of their own making.

Sunday rides in a battered Buick,
state highways traced in orange.
Twenty-fifth anniversary in Hawaii,
circled in pink
like their matching floral shirts.

Retired early, she insisted,
they sold all their worldly goods.
Left a three bedroom colonial
for a small motor home,
and rambled through forty states.

College towns starred in blue
for the young at heart.
Green highlights for favorite parks
and the Grand Canyon’s purple X,
the greatest site of all.

Now, in a pastel assisted living center
map of colors upon her wall,
she gazes out the window
at red and yellow tulips,
his ashes beneath their blooms.

With quaking hand
she touches coffee cup to pane,
then slowly to her lips.
This, their morning kiss, a ritual
now the road is still.

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Home Then or Again?

lillian10 Comments

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Scuffed Red Wing leather boots tread across forest floor. Trekking poles swing naturally at my side, two more points of contact to the earth. Closest thing to being four limbed.

Sun filters through leaves, beams on stands of gooseberry red, chokecherry orange and fiddlehead green. I walk through scrubby tree roots, climb over rocks to cross a stream, carried by wind and sun and bird song in the air.

Last week’s hike swirls fading as I maneuver city streets. Blue suit jostled, surrounded by tall grey, red brick towers that block the sun, save corners where green lights mean go. High heels comply, stumble from curb to pavement, and my feet ache again.

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Written from a September Challenge prompt: juxtapose opposites in a more subtle wording of contrast.  A prose poem.

Cool Waters

lillian5 Comments

I lie perfectly still, face to sky
on a clear plastic air mattress
plumped with my breath.

Sea breeze ruffles tendrils,
flutter-touch my forehead
warmed by afternoon sun.

Softly bobbing near the shore
fingers trail in cool waters
while ocean croons its song.

I drift, eyes closed
through barriers of time
afloat in my mother’s womb.

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This was a challenging prompt in my September 21 Day Challenge course: Use description but notice the difference between language that shows the reader a world, and language that tells a reader what you (or your speaker) think about it or feel about. 

Riding the Waves

lillian12 Comments

Gin and tonic on the rocks
atop a Cape Cod hill
overlooking white sail dots
on forever ocean scape.

I drift backward on the waves
to days on my old Boot Hill,
surrounded by empty fields
new subdivision coming soon.

Crouched low behind tall weeds
brambles with stick-on burrs
scratched knobby eleven year old knees,
we stalked bad guys never seen.

Rode horses round that dirt mound
inspired by westerns on console tvs.
Buster browns galloped and dusty laces flew,
head strong imaginations with no reins.

Parched by the high noon sun
horses unhitched and left to roam,
we walked home, hand in hand
to lemonade in aluminum glasses.

And we wondered how old
the Lone Ranger really was.

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Photo by Elvis Santana.

Time Descending

lillian9 Comments

I flung my arms out wide
to feel the wind
that sun baked day
danced, skirt billowing

cool sand between my toes

I stretched my arms out wide
to erase the fear
eyes locked on yours
step by first step, second, third

you chortled, giggling towards me

I curved my arms out wide
to envelop your leaving self
joyful sad, then turned and watched
the airport swallow you

emptiness descending

I raise these arms
tissue thin sagging skin
eyes search yours

name descending

shawl droops down legs
dancing somewhere
a thin filament

within this brain

disappearing into mist

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Her Legacy

lillian4 Comments

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It was a short notice.

Helen Cecile is predeceased
by Charles Andrew and Charles Gruenwald Jr,
her husband and son.
God knows, she’d lived the last eight years
impatiently waiting to join them.

It moved with her when she was left alone.
An eight by ten picture from a 1930s Life Magazine
a dark haired young nurse in white cap
surrounded by an aura of glowing light.

Her nurses’ training lasted six months.
Instead of earning a nurse’s pin
she eloped
and eight months later
put my brother to her breast.

The room was empty when I took it down.
Water-stained backing, script barely readable.
My dearest Helen,
No one can take this away from you.
Sister Everista 1937

For sixty years,
she’d kept her dream
in a plastic frame .

Revised from original post on April 17….to no acclaim except my neice’s phone call about this poem, about her grandma. My mom — 

Dancer Down

lillian5 Comments

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There it was. Audition.
Wanted: 100 dancers
for three months prep
to perform in Boston’s Copley Square.
No experience required.

I did the same thing,
twenty years ago
in Iowa.
Auditioned.
And was selected to perform.
Ninety-nine hoofer-wanna-bees
plus Gene Kelly and me.
Thousands watched us
in the Big-Ten half-time show
or took a trip for hotdogs
and the john.

So I did it. Again.
And made it.
Again.
Ninety-nine plus me
two nights every week.
Loud fast rehearsals
with slow
every day repeats
at home
to video
online.
I should have known.
I was twenty years older
not newer
and certainly not digital.

One month to go.
On our burgundy shag carpet
five-six-seven-eight
and again
right-turn-slide-spin.
Repeat at studio
on unforgiving wooden floor.
Five-six-seven-eight……
Crap.……dancer down.

Legs sag. Muscles be damned.
Relegated to RICE.
Rest-Ice-Compression-and-
– – oh hell. I forget
what the E stands for.

Originally posted on March 23, as Self-Portrait: Dancer Down, just my third post ever….revisited and revised. No Likes then, no comments, two followers (my family members)!