Category: Poetry

Deeper Than Wide

Tangled Roots

Fire as a Material Thing, not an energy source. Note apparent solidity, opacity, of the flames.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Deeper than wide, but both deep and wide,
the archetypal image of roots, resides in mind.
Your oak, not my maple.

Deeper than wide, but both deep and wide,
the tendrils of mind reach back in time
further than they spread in space.

Deeper than wide, the watcher gazes
at the tangled roots that are,
rather than the
teasing pyramidal archetype.

Deeper than wide, truth may be known.
Deeper than wide, truth has its tangles.
Deeper than wide, for now.

One day, the roots will spread,
grow wider than deep.
My maple, no longer your oak.

Wide and deep, deep and wide.
Truth eternally tangled.
Tangles once formed, tangle
forever.

Parallel Stanzas

Daily Prompt: Parallel

Reach, reach, reach. Reach for the stars!
No. I’m tired. Why should I?
It’s what we do.
It’s what you do.

Look, look, look. Look around you!
No. That’s boring. Why should I?
It’s what we are born to do.
It’s what you were born to do.

See, see, see. See what’s there, in front of you.
No. I can’t. I’m blind. I like it that way.
No, you’re not. Take off the dark glasses.
No. I live by my own inner light.

Wait, wait, wait. Patience is rewarded!
No. I inhabit the now.
We are creatures of our history and our future.
I am the creation of my own time zone.

 

Mid-Michigan Word Gatherers Prompt: Reach

Warning: Human Condition Ahead

Daily Post: Warning

Shark’s Eye https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hexanchus_nakamurai_JNC2615_Eye.JPG

Human condition

Ahead. Take care. You can’t know

what the future holds.

 

To live is to kill,

to enjoy, to be set up

for pain down the road.

 

Our total life’s way

is the average of all our

perceptions and acts.

 

 

 

Frantic Buddhist

Buddha Sculpture, from Behind, Photographed at its site on the grounds of the museum Formerly Known as the Prince of Wales Museum, in Mumbai, India. This sculpture is just off the lower left of the image you see on the linked home page for the museum.

Daily Prompt: Frantic

Frantic, I looked up.

Dismayed, looked out, then around.

No help was in sight.

 

Panicked, I looked in.

Confused and confined, I peered

through my clouded mind.

 

Fearing, peering through

familiar mist, truths emerge,

exits call my name.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Daily Promt: Fabric

Double woven Indian silk

via Daily Prompt: Fabric

 

Isn’t fabric a

better metaphor by which

to live than coin?

Events can be strands

in individual lives,

lives, strands of world cloth.

Both have two sides, but

fabric is flexible; can

be folded, or crumpled, and

so become

multi-dimensional. We

can hold it up to the light

and see right through to

the weaver’s skill.

The dark, the hidden portions

of the strands are just as important

as the clear or easy to spy.

 

Ode to a Shark

JULY 16, 2017

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hexanchus_nakamurai_JNC2615_Eye.JPG

A year or so ago, our writing group was challenged to write a sonnet. I completely failed. Fourteen lines of iambic pentameter (the rhythm of the heartbeat, the rhythm in which Shakespeare wrote his words) with a rhyme scheme abab cdcd efef gg. I could not get a single four lines in the required format. Then I had an idea a few weeks ago that my brain had reorganized itself and figured I could do it. It flowed. Unfortunately the second stanza did not make much sense. I let it sit and reworked it. Writing a sonnet is like working a crossword, our instructor informed us. Here is my first sonnet!

Ode to a Shark

To cloak desire, to hide your fire, to leave
no trace, no trail, no hint of what went right;
to walk as one who fears the grass will grieve
if blocked a moment’s time from rays of light;

No life is this.

I cast a shadow dark
to shelter others from the sun that blinds.
The shark goes where it likes; it leaves its mark,
and spares no tears for fish or human kinds.

True sharks seek blood. We judge their action not.
It takes all kinds to make the world. Some day
we homo saps might learn the truth of what
God tried to show the prophets of his way.

An afterthought, the holy blessèd life;
Embrace the pain you cause and skip the strife.