Ghosts By Marion For Mag 283

                                   For Mag 283

Ghosts

By Marion

White is not a color 

Peonies do not grow here

This vase is ostentatious

I will not shed a tear---

His absence is a presence

as real as my red robe

His spirit whispers secrets

that only we two know---

An Old Woman’s Painting By Lynn Emanuel

Bees left pollen tracks all over the Morning Glory.....

   The Zinnias and I are fading.... but anticipating Autumn

   The luminous Beautyberry Bushes are blooming.

  

The Chocolate Mint is flowering, feeding the butterflies...

____________________________________________

An Old Woman’s Painting

By Lynn Emanuel

Scrape the sun from the wall of  the sky. 

Cast the great nets of  autumn over the houses. 

Even the throat of  the lily is a dangerous inlet. 

Let the world stand wearily on the stoop of  the jail 

of  the world and the light of  the mind, that small lamp, 

pearl of  shine, let the night come to it, as iron filings to a magnet, 

mother.

-----------------------------------------------------

Autumn

By T. E. Hulme

A touch of cold in the Autumn night—
I walked abroad,
And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge
Like a red-faced farmer.
I did not stop to speak, but nodded,
And round about were the wistful stars
With white faces like town children.

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Heavenly Mother By Elaine Jarvis

Heavenly Mother

By Elaine Jarvis

God, I need to know,

do you have breasts?

And did you nurse creation

at your bosom?

Did you cradle it in newness---

tiny, fragile, wailing,

and feel the swell

of hopes and dreams

and Awe?

Did you, too, discover far too quickly

that to love someone you also must let go?

All my life, Lord,

I've known you as

HE

and that has been okay

until today.

Today, as I carry

in my heart,

and fear,

and prayer,

the child I also carried in my womb,

I need you to be

my heavenly Mother.

Today

I could not trust a God

who had not also

gazed with empty womb

upon the life she bore into existence

and asked,

"What more shall Love ask me to bear?"

From:  "Perhaps A Door - New and Selected a Poems" by Elaine Jarvis

------------------------

The Muse is Amused Today...

        How can a shoe be a poem?  The same way a cloud or a dragonfly can.

If I could find these shoes (Hot Chocolate Design), I'd make them into a poem. :-)

                        A ghost in my angel-wing begonia

A wonderful, delightful, delicious novel I'm reading.

   Buddha with some dried flowers, Angels & beads.

      A quote I wish I'd read when I was a very young person.

         The fading zinnias have the softest colors...

                                           PINK!!!

"I often sit here in this old Apple tree listening

and I hear Geese who've lost their mates...

they're not even aware of what's missing---

just that it's missed..."

From the movie 'Northern Borders', 2013

A Story That Could Be True By William Stafford

A STORY THAT COULD BE TRUE

By William Stafford

If you were exchanged in the cradle and

your real mother died

without ever telling the story

then no one knows your name,

and somewhere in the world

your father is lost and needs you

but you are far away.

He can never find

how true you are, how ready.

When the great wind comes

and the robberies of the rain

you stand on the corner shivering.

The people who go by–

you wonder at their calm.

They miss the whisper that runs

any day in your mind,

“Who are you really, wanderer?”–

and the answer you have to give

no matter how dark and cold

the world around you is:

“Maybe I’m a king.”

books, clinging and clouds...

"If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable." From "Burnt Norton", I

    " ...tendril and spray clutch and cling..."  (Photo taken minutes ago, before reading this...)

                     clematis, freshly open

         "The black cloud carries the sun away..."

IV

Time and the bell have buried the day,

The black cloud carries the sun away.

Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis

Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray

Clutch and cling?

     Chill

Fingers of yew be curled

Down on us?  After the kingfisher's wing

Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still

At the still point of the turning world.

From "Four Quartets - Burnt Norton" By T. S. Eliot

___________________________________________

Arranging, contemplating and perusing my books last week, I found six copies of Eliot's "Four Quartets" and three copies of Hemingway's "A Moveable Feast".  (I used to give away more books than I kept and the Universe always rewarded me with more books.  The law of giving and receiving.  Yes, it's a Universal and Biblical law.)  Now I place them in labeled containers for my children and grandchildren.  

More Deborah Digges' Poems

                    ~Prayer Flags in the Wind~

Free of the moon's collusion,

I feel like an abandoned

lover. ~ Deborah Digges

___________________

FOR SYLVIA PLATH

She gave birth here,
which is to own the land
like these cliff trees, so black and hard
and efficient, closed
to anything but fire.
She had two children, worked
between feedings, and kept two gardens,
one simply for flowers.
They must still root somewhere
on these hillsides the way seeds can be carried for years
by the thermals on the muddied
wings of insects, in the wool blown
free of the thickets,
in the hooves of cattle,
in the feces of migrating birds.
Now Devon greens in April,
even the chimneys, the reddish-blue clay
and stone, the timber
of the houses, while over the grass the clouds
outrun their shadows to the sea,
as if the earth turns too quickly, let go
from the hand of the air,
as if the sod must feel its way
closer to the rock
against such wind that blinds
enough to see these pastures given, hedge
by higher hedge, to sunlight.

Deborah Digges

______________________

Painting By Number

Deborah Digges

There was the farmer

who would not come to the front door,

his face already jaundiced, luminous,

as if death were light inside him.

He’d bring a picture as payment

saying it was his hobby now that he was

dying to paint what he’d never seen.

________________________

There is no way of telling people that they are all

walking around shining like the sun. ~Thomas Merton

                                                 ~Prayer Flags Laughing in the Wind~

eating the dragon's heart by Deborah Digges

                                      The Mother of Dragons, from Game of Thrones

eating the dragon's heart

by Deborah Digges

What god left for me here a dragon's heart.  Resembling

     a pomegranate,

In a gold box.  The parchment read Fresh kill.

Eat raw or braise in oil.

I lifted it from royal foil onto my best blue willow, blood

     of the ages

seeping out across the bluest bridge.

The first bite sap-like tasted of smoke-filled rooms---

women wearing smocks unloading kilns, stone sheets

     of charcoal

crushed in bowls, sprinkled with dew

drawn just that morning from high grasses.  The second bite,

     sour as a lemon

eaten whole, the rind and all, the root

of Queen Anne's lace and goldenrod.

Still through the burning I began to understand what the

     crows were saying,

speaking in tongues, their news fraught with

     ill-fated warnings.

Never they choired, be tempted to suck lifeless sweet buds

     hung of seeds.

It is a trap.  Nor smear onto this page the juice that stains

     like afterbirth

your fingers, lest you're condemned to winery again,

lest you fall through the ice of time.

Sunk to my knees in sludge I waded bogs collecting feathers

     to be used as quills.

Then swore the pledge, kissing goodbye the last bite of my

     lover's lips.

Swallowed it whole in my green sequined dress.

Why do we offer you a dragon's heart and not a pomegranate?

To ask, one has no right to call herself a poet.

Explicating the Twilight - Jack Gilbert

                            "...purple is black blooming." ~Jack Gilbert

Explicating the Twilight

Jack Gilbert

The rat makes her way up

the mulberry tree, the branches

getting thin and risky up close

to the fruit, and she slows.

The berry she is after is so ripe,

there is almost no red. Prospero

thinks of Christopher Smart saying

purple is black blooming. She lifts

her mouth to the berry, stretching.

The throat is an elegant gray.

A thousand shades, Christopher wrote

among the crazy people. A thousand

colors from white to silver.

The Weed by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

         My neighbor's weeds, visiting over the fence.

                                ~*~*~*~*~*~

THE WEED

A weed is but an unloved flower! 
    Go dig, and prune, and guide, and wait, 
    Until it learns its high estate, 
    And glorifies some bower. 
A weed is but an unloved flower!

All sin is virtue unevolved, 
    Release the angel from the clod-- 
    Go love thy brother up to God. 
Behold each problem solved. 
    All sin is virtue unevolved.

Poems of Progress and New Thought Pastels by Ella Wheeler Wilcox. 
London: Gay & Hancock, 1911.

          Comfrey below & Kale seed pods above.

1. Echinacea is a group of herbaceous flowering plants in the daisy family. The Echinacea genus has nine species, which are commonly called purple coneflowers.

CLOUD PHARMACY by Susan Rich

www.fantasywire.co.uk/ - Fantasy Wire fairy sculptures of fairies made from wire by a sculptor in Oakamoor Staffordshire near Alton Towers in the U.K.

                                          Antique apothecary cabinet

                    Fantasy Wire Fairies Sculptures  -  www.fantasywire.co.uk/

                               

                                                         ==============

CLOUD PHARMACY by Susan Rich

How many apothecary drawers
could I fill with these deliberations?

The pharmacist’s paper cone
parsing out a quarter cup

of love’s resistant drug,
spoons measuring new prescriptions

for my uncertainty, hipsway, gesture.
Give me cobalt bottles

leftover from aunt iska’s cures,
albastrons of ointments, resins to resolve

the double-helix of desire inside of me.
Where is the votive, the vessel,

the slide rule calculation—
to know how much good love

alchemically speaking is
good enough?

I want spindrift nights on swimmer’s
thighs. I want an Egyptian

elevator inlaid in camphorwood and ivory;
a West African drumbeat, an eggnog, a god.

I want waves and summer all year long.
I want you. And I want more.

From the awesome book: "CLOUD PHARMACY" by Susan Rich

Although the wind...

Although the wind
blows terribly here,
the moonlight also leaks
between the roof planks
of this ruined house.

Izumi Shikibu
translated by Jane Hirshfield

MIDSUMMER By Sydney King Russell

I keep flashing back to the poems I read, memorized and loved in jr. high school that began my poetry journey.  And as I was hunting down this gem, I found a sneaky little bitch who'd totally plagiarized it and signed her name to it.  It should be a felony to rip off another's poems.  

I'm reading a good summer tome, "The Little Paris Bookshop" by Nina George.  "The main character, Monsieur Perdu, calls himself a literary apothecary.  From his floating bookstore in a barge on the Seine, he prescribes novels for the hardships of life..."  ~from the book jacket.

My dream life used to be living on a boat on any river, anywhere. But to do it and SELL BOOKS!!! Wow!  The great thing I discovered is that several people actually do sell books from their barges on the Thames. 

Love & Blessings,

Marion

"Who can tell the dancer from the dance?" ~Yeats

MIDSUMMER

By Sydney King Russell

You loved me for a little,
Who could not love me long;
You gave me wings of gladness
And lent my spirit song.

You loved me for an hour
But only with your eyes;
Your lips I could not capture
By storm or by surprise.

Your mouth that I remember
With rush of sudden pain
As one remembers starlight
Or roses after rain . . .

Out of a world of laughter
Suddenly I am sad. . . .
Day and night it haunts me,
The kiss I never had.

Ipomoea or The Art of Clinging By Marion

Ipomoea or The Art of Clinging

By Marion

No one is free.

Freedom is an illusion.

Your room is not there.

Nobody cares.

the ipomoea instinctively 

reaches up to the sky

clinging to whatever's near

Nothing thrives in

total isolation.

There is no detachment

in nature.

notknowing is

nopain

up, up, up...

ignorance truly is bliss.

What was once green,

vibrant & juicy

is now dried up, brown

& useless....useless!!!!

even a poet's gypsy soul

can be bound & knotted,

wither & die in isolation---

why? death always wins...

  

We're all alone.

you'll wane, too

I'm warning you...

forget you ever knew

the meaning of succulent

wild lust/love/life...

the ipomoea won't grow

in a void:

water, dirt, love,

bees & moths,

warm sunshine...

for such it pines...

You won't even look back

fondly (at all!)

at all that 

steamy, poetry-inspiring 

hormonal, mind-bending sex.

don't laugh, it ain't a hex I'm cooking

I'm warning you that

this, too, shall pass.

One day'll be your last

& you won't know.

YOUR BODY WILL BETRAY YOU.

It's a ticking clock & 

will stop & won't be

right twice a day, ever again.

Put it on the calendar.

The end is near (in more ways than one)---

The ipomoea, after thousands of 

fragrant flowers,

one night

fails to bloom (bleed)---no foreshadowing,

no premonitions, 

it's just gone.

Gone...

8/3/15

The Best Thing About August Is September

August has crept in on the heels of July's magnificent full Blue Moon wearing as little as possible.  Must be the heat. I place containers of water all around the yard to grow some mosquitoes for the many dragonflies.  It's been a dry Summer.  Even the tap water comes out of the faucet steaming hot and undrinkable. Walking down my concrete driveway to the mailbox barefooted burns the soles of my feet and I recall barefoot childhood summers walking on hot dirt/sand and never even blinking.  (The title is quite tongue-in-cheek.  August is lush, colorful, fecund, nostalgic, & wildly generous.)

             A gorgeous dragonfly on a dying Sunflower stalk. We communed, eye to eye.

                           Same dragonfly perched on a piece of dried bamboo.

Sweet blue dragonflies

always bringing me

pieces of sky---

~Marion, 8/2/15

                                        Wild flowers growing across the street.

                               Glorious Morning Glory with her Godlight glowing...

                        Heat-resistant hot pink Periwinkles.  They thrive, even in August.

            Zinnias, the ten cent package of flower seeds that never, ever fail to bloom.

     Okay, another Clematis (passionflower).

  My Toad who grew up on my patio & brought her baby to live here. I keep them watered. :-)

         An abandoned Bluebird nest we found. I think House Sparrows ran them off. :-(

                           My Garden spider.

                                  Catfish :-)