“The lyfe so short, the craft so long to lerne." –Chaucer
The challenge, it seems,
is to somehow arrange,
to slow-dance with Familiar,
but awaken with Strange.
To be like a welder
shooting showers of sparks,
birthing hot, fluid joinings,
behind a mask full of stars. Continue reading “Ashes and Snowflakes”
W. B. Yeats, 1865 – 1939
Where dips the rocky highland Of Sleuth Wood in the lake, There lies a leafy island Where flapping herons wake The drowsy water rats; There we’ve hid our faery vats, Full of berrys And of reddest stolen cherries. Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand. Where the wave of moonlight glosses The dim gray sands with light, Far off by furthest Rosses We foot it all the night, Weaving olden dances Mingling hands and mingling glances Till the moon has taken flight; To and fro we leap And chase the frothy bubbles, While the world is full of troubles And anxious in its sleep. Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand. Where the wandering water gushes From the hills above Glen-Car, In pools among the rushes That scarce could bathe a star, We seek for slumbering trout And whispering in their ears Give them unquiet dreams; Leaning softly out From ferns that drop their tears Over the young streams. Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand. Away with us he’s going, The solemn-eyed: He’ll hear no more the lowing Of the calves on the warm hillside Or the kettle on the hob Sing peace into his breast, Or see the brown mice bob Round and round the oatmeal chest. For he comes, the human child, To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world’s more full of weeping than he can understand.
A cold March breeze made something tinkle
as it came around the side of the house,
reminding me how things could be again
if I didn’t feed the birds.
Peaceful inside this tube, quiet, rolling gently side to side, as smooth as the hips of a woman strolling to dinner on the boardwalk on a hot July evening,
Thin fabric stretched just right over just-so curves.
Making him wait,
Liking the feeling she gets from the way she walks, knowing she just made a guy crash into a rack of postcards.
Her rhythms are as old as the ocean, in time with the waves out in the musky duskiness of another hot day, Both bringing more good things to shore.
The seagulls cry overhead and the crowds of tourists part as she passes.
Passing this along from BookDaily.com. A good editor is critical for a writer who wants to improve, and to give readers their best effort.
Poor Editing
We all need an editor from time to time. It’s not something we outgrow. One very intelligent and literate adult I know had to be convinced that it was “together” not “togather.” I married him anyway.
Continue reading “#1 Reason Readers Hate Indie Books: Poor Editing”
There are some remarkable talents out there… Such as Cabinetwriter.
The valleys stretch
and bow away
and I
unzip the land
in swaths
and glean the backdrop.
A blind-stitched
highway sewn
beneath
the sky with I-15’s
cats-eye and miles of blacktop.
Cartooned
through cobalt clouds,
the bands of light
are breaking prisms
caught reposed in angles.
The hoodoo
hanging vertically,
ignite
a multicolored
slab of rainbow
dangle.
No arc or ends,
the swatch above
a wide
parabola of sage
is flanked by storm,
dissolves and passes
on the driver’s side;
my weather
dropped from lashes,
rolls down
warm.
Something new every day. Check this site out…
Hadrian (76-138) was the fourteenth Emperor of Rome (10 August 117 to 10 July 138). Born Publius Aelius Hadrianus, probably in Hispania, Hadrian is best known for his substantial building projects throughout the Roman Empire. He established cities throughout the Balkan Peninsula, Egypt, Asia Minor, and Greece. Among his most celebrated legacies was Hadrian’s Wall. Construction of the wall, known in antiquity as Vallum Hadriani, was begun around 122 and corresponded to Hadrian’s visit to the province. It marked the northern boundary of the Roman Empire in Britain but the length and breadth of the project (stretching, as it did, from coast to coast) suggests that the more important purpose of the wall was a show of Rome’s power.
Professor D. Brendan Nagle writes that Hadrian spent most of his reign (twelve out of twenty-one years) traveling all over the Empire visiting the provinces, overseeing the administration, and checking the…
View original post 1,572 more words
Spillwords republished “Fireflies…” to tip their hat to the publication of the book by the same name, and added the little experimental audio reading I’d done. The new piece went up this morning.
“I Came From a Place of Fireflies”
The weather kicks sideways this time of year. It’s not always as bad as the year we got 39 inches of snow in one night in March and were snowed in for three days, but there’s always something.
It was warm as a sweet late May in the mountains three days ago, the time the redbuds and mountain laurel are in bloom, and sometimes dogwoods. But now we’re just grumping about it, siting under four inches of fluffy snow. It looks pretty resting soft on trees turning the world a shining, heavenly white in the morning sun, but it isn’t really welcome. Continue reading “That Time of Year”
I want to describe my life in hushed tones
like a TV nature program. Dawn in the north.
His nose stalks the air for newborn coffee.
–In “Braided Creek: A conversation in poetry”, Ted Kooser and Jim Harrison. Copper Canyon Press. 2003
(Posting again. I think this is the third time….)
“Fair goes the dancing when the Sitar is tuned.
Tune us the Sitar neither high nor low,
And we will dance away the hearts of men.
But the string too tight breaks, and the music dies.
The string too slack has no sound, and the music dies.
There is a middle way.
Tune us the Sitar neither low nor high.
And we will dance away the hearts of men.”
—Sir Edwin Arnold, “The Light of Asia” (often misattributed to a saying of Buddha)
Near a flower shop off boulevard Raspail
a woman in a sundress bending over
I’d guess about 49 years of age
in a particular bloom, just entering
the early Autumn of her life
a thousand-year-old smile on her face
so wide open that I actually shuddered
the same shudder I did in 1989
coming over the lip of a sandbar
and seeing a big bear below me.
It’s a little game of chance with no risk and no obligation. And you might win a Kindle copy of “I Came From A Place of Fireflies”. Really, isn’t that enough?
I’m tied down, again.
Why do I keep doing this to myself, I can’t help thinking. The two men standing over me don’t look pleased. I decide to name them Butch and Larry. They are frowning down at my bare gut, muttering in Russian.
“Can you please tell me what is going on?” I ask Butch.
The men don’t even pause. Larry takes out an I-Phone-looking-thing and presses it to my stomach. He sighs and nods at the other Butch. They both look me in the face, disappointed, yet, resigned. They untie me and hoist me up between them. I’m not a big man, but, neither are they.
As they drag me towards the entry way, the apartment door opens. My roommates walk in. They are talking about Radiohead. They stop and stare. I’m stark naked, crucified between two strangers.
“Hi guys. This is Butch and Larry. Mind giving me…
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Some poems make me an archaeologist.
I roll back the stone from the tomb of some
long-buried memory and analyze artifacts.
It seems more and more important to
look for what I can, to catalogue
it and make sure contexts are in order.
I can clearly see a soft brush
moving in my hand, delicately
clearing the dust from that time I was six or seven,
and we were at recess, in the monkey bars at
an old, old school building now
torn down 20 years ago.
The day was warm and bright,
glowing in that special benign October sun,
the girls squealing and running
—just fast enough to get
caught before everyone got tired—
as the boys chased them around and around.
Learning the rules of the mating game.
The lemon-yellow maple and bright-red oak
leaves in the sloping park just off the playground
were down in wind-shaped drifts. Farm kids all,
we simply asked a teacher for the rake
which she got for us, and we
made piles, big crunchy soft piles,
and jumped in them while Mrs. Fish looked on,
her arms crossed, sharing the moment,
stretching recess a few minutes because she knew
moments like this would end soon enough
and we would grow up and be gone…
and of course she was right.
I was a relentless swimmer as a child, more at home
under water, popping up only for air, wishing for gills.
In the pond’s murky realm a few feet down, the big bass, motionless,
eyes swiveling, waited for someone’s last mistake.
In the muddy shallows, the sun warmed the water most,
small things hatched, safe from mouths in the deep water.
Forests of fronds and grasses stretched toward the light,
and died, becoming the black ooze where biting things lived.
I lost it along the way, that simple way a child observes in wonder,
accepting in wisdom, the heavenly song of the world everywhere.
My job these days is to be the archeologist of my life, diving
over and over and staying down, wishing for gills and more time.
On soft summers’ nights, lovesick bullfrogs boomed at the edges.
A muskrat swam in the moonlight, wake effortlessly symmetrical.
All around town, on lampposts, hang
banners memorializing
hometown heroes.
Boys in uniforms who went to war
in 1941, or ’42 or ’43 or later,
who never came back from that
sunken transport ship, or that
awful night on Iwo,
or who stepped in front of a truck
outside a bar at 1 a.m. in liberated
France, having dodged all the bullets
but not a truck full of supplies.
Maybe it’s that people who live in
mountain towns like this
Just have longer memories than most,
surrounded by the rounded remnants
of a once-great mountain range.
Rocks have long memories.
Or maybe we have a need to hang
onto the deep grief longer than is fashionable
in these throwaway times.
seeking sublime surrender
“The lyfe so short, the craft so long to lerne." --Chaucer
I dream so I write ..
In happiness my words I lack, in grief they overflow.
Audrey Dawn
Creative Nonfiction & Poetry
by Kelly L
THE DRIVELLINGS OF TWATTERSLEY FROMAGE
HemmingPlay 
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