precocious

Some claim April rain
brings the blossoms of May, but
trees here are hasty.


This is the opening stanza of this month's format challenge over at the Imaginary Garden with Real Toads. We're writing a renga together, and I'm so excited to read the finished result.

isshoukenmei

一生懸命

Bright sun, shining through
rika-laden branch, compels:
shadows flee my heart.
--

Lichen blooms on elderly rock, oh! Sustenance!

--

Gentle white wing lofts
a view of discreet petals;
her fan beckoning.

--

Lucky bamboo, prisoned with rocks, invites--whose luck?

--

Without, sakura drift. Within, bare branches still.

--
Teikei (fixed-form) haiku for this month's format challenge at the Imaginary Garden with Real Toads.

Rika, 李花, ume (plum) blossoms, first harbingers of spring. Sakura, 桜, cherry blossoms, full celebration of fleeting spring. Isshoukenmei, 一生懸命, to try one's very hardest, to do as best one can.

temenos

on this ash-smothered road,
at the top of a dead hill
there is no punctuation

some red corrections
smeared with bitten fingers,
pressed harsh into yellowed pages

and the year I left
wells up like poisoned water
on the verge of overflow.

step back, look away
from the brink, from the brimming.
I leave no stone unmarked
while evening's ink spills and splashes

around this circle gouged out of light.


Written for Marian's musical prompt at the Imaginary Garden with Real Toads.

Charybdis

I am the ocean's daughter,
adrift still on all these years.
Waist-deep in murky water--
is it rain I feel? Or tears?


First attempt at a tanaga, this month's format challenge, for the Imaginary Garden with Real Toads.

smokescreen

it's a goddamned miracle,
your face in the morning,
rising into an evening of shredded song.

if I dare touch a fountain pen, dark words
fly out, iridescent black feathers
drifting down to lodge in my hair

where last night's sunset is still sleeping.
you remember a mirror image, I know.
you see silver-sharp and frail

when I am bone and ink and ember.
I am all of these, steel and amber,
shimmering oil on restless water, pushing impatient

at the struck match burning so slowly
toward your long fingers. I can let
the past reel out behind us like copper wire. I will not forget,

but I can still breathe you in,
old words tattooed in crimson
stitched into my skin.


Written for Marian's musical prompt at the Imaginary Garden with Real Toads.

precipitous

You hover outside my sphere of influence,
ever so close to penetrating within. Just out
of reach, I run my hands along the barrier.
Now, barometric or interior,
pressures are shifting,

the wind is changing. You tell me
my eyes have informed the green of the sky,
the air, and just that fast,
it turns--the supercell whirls gaily toward me.

Your heart, the very center of the bow echo,
sets all the warning sirens shrieking.
That unearthly whine shifts all my dreams,
pierces and stitches. A careful injection
of your inimitable attempts at nonchalance,

at caution, anathematic caution.
For me, caution is just
the laughing mouth of the funnel,
its cruel gape breathing thunder down my neck

while I pull up my striped stockings,
slot garter buttons into each keyhole,
while I step into bright red boots
and wait for you to touch down.


Written for the Personal Challenge at the Imaginary Garden with Real Toads. 

four ignoble truths

A whetstone, cold and grey. From my knuckles to my fingertips
   I am rough and red. I have a sharkskin pad for bright green
   wasabi and a yellow porcelain bowl filled with deep pink ginger
   pickled in sweet rice vinegar. I know what is hidden, rooted
   in these cupboards, in the shadows behind the flour and sugar,
   I know my ingredients. I know what I have and what is missing.
   I am full up on the wretched ignorance of samsara, overflowing
   with desperate illusion and the blatant grieving half-life of desire.
   I don't have satori. I have no locks on my aching heart, ground
   under your heel like an inky stone. I have these days and nights.
   I don't have you. Now I sharpen, I grind. I place the chips and
   shards of my heart in the mortar bowl and bear down on the pestle,
   bear down, endless. Are you hungry? Let me feed you.

prescription

Three tasks: to climb a hill of glass barefoot;
show your iron will by staying awake
to catch the Firebird at thievery;
to build our castle beneath the lake.

These are the riddles I set. To catch me,
you must also survive on stories.

curmudgeon

I can never change--I am a mandrake,
rooted in dry and sour soils.

Articulate

If you missed my article on the awdl gywydd for the Imaginary Garden with Real Toads, Kate Dempsey has graciously reposted it over at Writing.ie's guest blog, Poetic License.  I meant to tell you this last month, but somehow it slipped my mind. Many thanks, Kate!!

Your modestly miraculous Captain,
Grace

the last ritual

lovely recoloring of the Rider-Waite deck 

illustration by Pamela Colman Smith,

found here.

Woodsmoke and bone, raw sugarcane,
spitting splinters into the rain,
on the waning of the moon
we wait, fight impatience. Resist
our baser urges. They exist
who missed, who set out too soon.

I light the fire with my cut hair,
each snaking curl a brazen flare
ringing an alarum blast.
This blazing fast consumes the bone
and leaves only the dark. The Crone
upon her throne sits at last.

The herbs well-pounded, cold and green,
taste of slow death, of sights unseen
by man or wean. How they cry!
As I've become, I laugh aloud.
I stand so tall, inside Her shroud;
hush the crowd--and prophesy.

Questions answered or denied flat,
all cards are laid out on the mat.
Hear that?  The barrier thins.
Circled magic wins over all;
the coming year awaits our call.
With nightfall, the song begins.

The rain now stopped, the air is fell
with mist and life and fear of hell.
Hollow shell of me, disperse
into the dawning of the year.
I try to breathe it deep, but hear
our end clear in chanted verse.

Second attempt at a cywydd llosgyrnog for the Imaginary Garden with Real Toads. Somehow, they all end up as aubade.  


For my beloved coven, celebrating Samhain for the first time without me.  I miss you all.

remember

Inchoate still, a longing that grows
unbearable with the heaviness of time,
as swift as, from mountains, any snow-melt flows,
inchoate. Still, a longing that grows
is hot and ridged; like an old scar, it quietly shows
hints of its existence. It prophesies decline,
inchoate still--but a longing that grows
unbearable, with the heaviness of time.

discrepancies

Come and find me, dear Doctor Sleep,
and I'll press my poison into your heart.
I require a dram to fall into dreaming deep,
lest they come and find me.  Dear Doctor Sleep,
I'm afraid of the blade and of the final leap;
I'm certain to need your delicate art.
Come and find me, dear Doctor Sleep,
and press me like poison into your heart.



This week's format is the triolet.  Here's my first attempt at the form for the Imaginary Garden with Real Toads, with a little inspiration from my hero, Stephen King, who refuses to get out of my head.

only in dreams

The touch of your hand, I crave, so light on mine
and so heavy with lovely meaning. Must I decline
the sweet invitation of your hesitant eyes, those blue
pools alight, so rarely, as I lean in so close to you?
They're too deep to escape, I think--and that is fine.

The hush of our home like the misty breath of a shrine
draws me in dreams. I long to curl around you like a vine
and relish that, forever and always, it is gloriously new,
the touch of your hand.

Someday, I pray soon, with you I'll be twined
when those numerous plans fall in place and in line.
We'll be awake to see light on red morning's dew,
and breathe in the peace of a most foreign view
where no one could see and no one would mind
the touch of your hand.

Rondeau attempt number two for the imaginary garden with real toads.  Well...at least it's not about zombies?

Good Night, Sweetheart

It's all at once, and terribly so,
a dead hand closes on us--and we know
they'll never relent, no matter how
we beg and plead. And on you now,
that grim and hungry grey-green shadow,

the pariah sign that says you must go
into the dark. We can't take this slow.
Give me your shotgun, take one final bow,
and that's all.  At once.

Were you toothless, I'd wait and show
you the longing that could lay me low,
the lust I hold for daylight on your brow.
You're a deadly danger, I cannot disavow.
You're human still, inside, I know...
but you all were, once.


This week's challenge format is the rondeau.  This hasty entry does not adhere precisely to the rules, so I'll post at least one more soon.  Besides, writing about the zombie apocalypse is no way to be taken seriously...right?

Interview with a Pirate

Much to my surprise, Phillip Thrift over at the Imaginary Garden with Real Toads slotted me for an interview this week.  It's been posted, so if you care to peek at my underpinnings for a bit...here you go.

Your brightly blushing Captain,
Grace

je suis folle de toi

C'est pas ma faute
l'hiver rapide est arrivée.
C'est pas ma faute,
c'est mon coeur qui très lâche tressaute
et tout le monde sont captivés.
Le tourbillon inexpliqué,
c'est pas ma faute.


NB: If there are any French-speakers in my audience, please let me know if I have absolutely bollixed this--I'm eleven years away from being able to speak competently, and I refuse to use Google Translate or similar, so this was done with my dictionary and memory alone.  Merci mille fois!

den lille havfrue

At fifteen, I rose to a strange surface, finally

took a deep compelling breath of weightless air.

It was freedom. No different from rebirth, it became

a sea-change that left me mute and gasping for you.

It took me ten years, then, to stop holding my breath,

to remember how to sing, when every step was

disjointing agony. Still, I learned how to run away.

Too many years now have passed for us, for my

seaweed-tangled hair all the colors of sunset

to lure you home. I want to live in deeper

waters now. I am so tired of walking on knives,

so tired of bloody footprints marking this dance,

that I could lie down right here, regardless of

any storm that might blow through. Damp

soothes dark circles stamped around green eyes,

and I can dissolve

into rough scratching brown-sugar sand,

from sticky sea foam into airy oblivion.

ruby-throated

Crimson sparks flashing bright

dress up this hovering, otherwise-drab hummingbird.

Crimson sparks flashing bright, 

an unexpected treasure, a shocking secret overheard.

This day may not be ending as I would have preferred,

but I can look forward to stars glimmering in the night,

and crimson sparks, flashing bright.

This week's format is the rondelet, about which I've posted AT GREAT LENGTH on the Imaginary Garden with Real Toads for the Tuesday Format Challenge.  This is my first attempt, and while it isn't particularly awful?  I'll be adding the rondelet to the growing number of poetic formats that require more attention.  Sigh.