Category: writing, poetry

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Spinning

Spinning

It is a little over a month since my last piece. In that time the world has turned green, the peonies have opened and gracefully bent their scented weight to the ground and I have had my second eye surgery. It was not as simple as hoped, but it wasn’t filled with drama the way the first was. In a sedated haze I heard the surgeon say suture, another suture, another suture and lost count after six. There were ten when there were supposed to be none.

This was just a week ago and my eye is healing, It will take some time and some patience with a blurred world, but this time it is not tinged with fear. That has made all the difference.

I think about how fear limits what we see and how well we listen. It influences how we perceive what in in front of us, what we hear and what we believe to be possible. Like driving with no windshield wipers in a pouring rain, fear distorts. It becomes all too easy to miss the car in the next lane, the upcoming curve, the shadow of a deer. There’s no vanquishing fear but there is a way to turn into it, the way I was taught to drive when sliding, to turn into a spin and then slowly turn back again.

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poetry

Outside the day has turned to cold gray rain and spring rolled back to a late winter sky. But oh the light. the light against the tender April green.

it is NAPOWRIMO: National Poetry Writing Month and the challenge is a poem a day everyday of April. It is a joyful challenge, imbued with ease and release. Not that its easy per se but that its fun. Because every poem is just that – another poem for another day, a draft, a free write, an expression.

Visit http://www.napowrimo.net where each day you’ll find a featured poet (one of our group is today’s poet), a poem in translation and a prompt. Try it out. Why not…I share each day’s poem with a group of writing friends. We respond to each other by echoing back a line or two from each other’s poem. No critique, no revisions just breathing out and breathing in words as the weather swirls and changes, moving closer toward the warmth that’s coming and the cold we thought we left behind.

Today’s prompt – write a bot a flower:

Lavender
Somewhere there is a field of lavender
undulating in the wind that descends
with dusk. The soft musk of scent
releases as the small flowers are crushed
by the hooves of deer crossing wood to wood.
Already the sky has turned a bruised mauve
a violet hue, a red sun brushes the tree line
everything is cloaked in light
the disappearing deer, the lavender
the tender green of newly leafed branches.
Night darkens from the east
even as the moon rises
even as the stars appear.

 

 

 

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Ghost Ranch Retreat

When the boundaries of my heart are blurred it is time to retreat into the words held in that small cave: the place that is sweetly damp with the scent of dream and memory, where paths lead into woods, and streams shimmer with darting minnows and the breeze carries the hush of a trees

While most of my childhood was spent on city streets, the songs of jump rope, the ping of the rock in hopscotch, the cracks of sidewalks, it is the shorter times of country that I retreat to , a place of quiet where words can emerge like hummingbirds, light and fast, suspending time, at first glance fragile but size belies their strength and endurance, their wings blurring light, and therefore time itself.

To retreat: To withdraw, to pull back, to reflect and reassess and then re-enter, reignited, renewed.

I used to think this could be done on occasion, now I believe we realign our choices not only day by day but hour by hour, the path shifts, the shifting geography of daily life requires constant refocusing, not with reactionary or rigid vigilance but rather with the compassion of the curving path I draw as I walk it.