Weekly Photo Challenge: Escape | Broken Shell

In my left hand I am holding a broken shell.

In the foreground the figure of a man is a blur.

What is his purpose? Why is he unclear?

Is he looking for escape routes above the moving sea?

Am I beside him?

Lady Serenity

When Lady Serenity
saw me, she swerved.

Her detour a reminder not to dwell on anxiety.

I want to absorb the tempo of my female hero.

Go with her on a journey. We’ll decide.

Fill a syrup-colored packing case with maps loosely packed.

Plan our getaway on the backs of envelopes.  Take me with you.

“Live and love as if there’s no tomorrow.” I wish she’d said to me.

“Die to tomorrow.”

Add as a P.S.

 

Moon People on Mother’s Day

In honor of Mother’s Day in America — and for new friends and followers of my blog I want to take this opportunity to re-publish a piece of writing I did when I was 12 years old! 

I give thanks to my mother and father for giving me a room with a view in which to write to my heart’s content.

Moon People – Friday 25 February 1977

When moon people grow old, they do not die. They just vanish into thin air, like smoke – and talking of smoke, I must tell you about their diet, which is precisely the same for everyone. When they feel hungry, they light a fire and roast some frogs on it – for there are lots of these creatures flying around in the air. Then while the frogs are roasting, they draw up chairs around the fire, as if it were a sort of dining-room table, and gobble up the smoke.

That is all they ever eat. And to quench their thirst they just squeeze some air into a glass and drink that: the liquid produced is rather like dew.

Bald men are considered very handsome on the moon, and long hair is thought absolutely revolting. But on young stars like the comets, which have not yet lost their hair, it is just the other way round. Or so I was told by a comet-dweller who was having a holiday on the moon when I was there.

I forgot to mention that they wear their beards a little above the knee; and they have not any toenails, for the very good reason that they have not any toes. What they have got, however, is a large cabbage growing just above the buttocks like a tail. It is always in flower, and never gets broken, even if they fall on their backs.

When they blow their noses, what comes out is extremely sour honey, and when they have been working hard or taking strenuous exercise, they swear milk at every pore. Occasionally, they turn it into cheese, by adding a few drops of the honey. They also make olive oil out of onions, and the resulting fluid is extremely rich and has a very delicate perfume.

They have any number of vines, which produce not wine but water, for the grapes are made of ice; and there, in my view, you have the scientific explanation of hail storms, which occur whenever the wind is strong enough to blow the fruit off the vines.

They use their stomachs as handbags for carrying things around in, for they can open and shut them at will. If you look inside one, there is nothing to be seen in the way of digestive organs, but the whole interior is lined with fur so that it can also be used as a centrally-heated pram for babies in cold weather.

The upper class people wear clothes made of flexible glass, but the material is rather expensive, so most people have to be content with copper textiles. For there is any amount of copper in the soil, which becomes as soft as wool when soaked in water.

I hardly like to tell you about their eyes, for fear you should think I’m exaggerating, because it really does sound incredible. Still, I might as well risk it, so goes: their eyes are detachable!!

As for ears, they have to be satisfied with a couple of plane-tree leaves.

I must just mention one other thing I saw in the King’s Palace on the moon. It was a large mirror suspended over a fairly shallow tank. If you got into the tank you could hear everything that was being said on Earth, and if you looked in the mirror, you could see what was going on anywhere in the world, as clearly as if you were actually there yourself.

I had a look at all the people I knew at home, but whether they me saw me or not I cannot really say.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Pattern | Neglect

The subject of this week’s photo challenge is patterns.  In a new post specifically created for this challenge, share a picture which means PATTERN to you! 

The exterior of a house in Sierra Leone, West Africa. My heart is drawn to the pattern of neglect, the pattern of deterioration.

Head In The Clouds

When I was growing up my mother would say to me: “Child of mine you have your head in the clouds.”

When I grew older I discovered that folks who write poetry are in the minority.

I’m half afraid to write poetry
for you who never read it much

and I’m left laboring
with the secrets and the silence

In plain language.

– Adrienne Rich

Photo Challenge: Above | Feather

In a new post specifically created for this challenge, share a picture which means FROM ABOVE to you!

This feather fell from above and rested a while in my garden.

Poetry Challenge #24: Two Bodies

Two bodies speak to each other in smoke rings.

Signals blown back and forth. The mysterious air

between the pair: cloaking their mystery.

What are they saying? Is language extinct?

Are words with all their meanings pinned

down. Frozen. Stiff.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Up

An African boy looks up at the camera.

His father is disabled and he’s playing with his father’s crutches.

The family live on a $1 a day and these crutches are the only ‘toys’ the boy has to play with.

For this week’s WordPress photo challenge on the theme of ‘Up’,  I’m wondering what is uppermost in this boy’s mind at the moment I took the photograph.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Change

The Peace Project, an international social movement that I work with in Sierra Leone, changed this man’s life by giving him a pair of crutches.

I took this photograph in May 2012 during one of The Peace Project’s crutch distribution efforts in Sierra Leone, West Africa.

Opened Ground

My soul is the waiter serving me at the Sky bar.

Factored into this exchange is duality.

Longing and loss crawl against my skin like jealous thieves picking my combination lock.

My shadow challenges my soul to a drinking contest.

Now the bar is minus a waiter.

Future Love Paradise

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. 

Some see nature all ridicule and deformity… and some scarce see nature at all. 

But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.

– William Blake

Why I Don't Diet - An Ode to My Father

Reblogged from More Cabaret:

My father died three weeks ago. He was in hospice, with all the pharmacological and technological assistance available to keep him comfortable and pain-free, but it was still, as deaths go, not a good one.

I had flown in hours after I’d heard about his fall. He was in late-stage heart and renal failure, and this fall was the beginning of the end.

Read more… 968 more words

I encourage you all to read this extraordinary account. There is something here for everyone. Peace and blessings, Michele

The Mystery of the Missing Panel

Reblogged from IshaiyaFreshlySqueezed:

The Mystery of the Missing Lamb

About two weeks ago now I was perusing the website of a rather wonderful person and fellow blogger called Michele. I came across an article she had written concerning a very famous painting by Renaissance artists the brothers van Eyck, known as the 'Adoration of the Mystic Lamb', a magnificent alter-piece painted for the Cathedral of St.Bavo, in Ghent in around 1432.

Read more… 2,023 more words

My thanks to friend Ishaiya for her extraordinary post and incredible insights. Read this and see the light in this moment. Love and peace to you all. Michele

Tall and Medium Tales

Where was I before the mercury rose?

The day so dry all I can do is get naked on wet sheets and dive
into a book of fairytales called Floating Down The Sea of Ears.

Tall and medium tales about proteans (shapeshifters) like Leonardo
Da Vinci whose career took many shapes such as he was said to have
a ‘protean career’, and a fairytale within a fairytale about a fraternity

of surrealist poets living in exile on the Island of Writers. Each scribe
has cut off one ear to protest the watering down of freedom of speech.

On the Island of Writers, they argue and rant long into the night. Talking
over each other, their hearing impaired and their thinking short-sighted.

I make several pathetic attempts to shift my attention back from island.
Altered by what I’ve witnessed, it’s too late for my brain. The fixtures
and fittings in my apartment — the sofabed, piano, cable TV, candles,

kitchen table, bathroom scales, door frame, window blinds, security
alarm system and my sheets have become part of me; as my habitat
pulls me under the floorboards and this reader connects to the umbilical
cord of the fraternity.

We argue and rant long into the night.
My blood orange eyes look puzzled beneath
my purple shaded eyelids. Half-open and half-sealed.

I weigh their arguments on my bathroom scales. The scales
crack, snap and pop as the debates rage at arm’s length.

How does this fairytale end? Will I flash upon The End?
My first impression is of a monotone snake coiled inside
a M.C. Escher drawing.

Is that black and white snake, Gaia contemplating us? Are
we mirror cells? Mirroring each other’s cells, or are we not?

Asymmetry?
A symmetry?
A thinner tree?

Are the colors in Escher’s field (of vision) under review?
Who was it that said: “Silence is so accurate, the mind’s imagination can also paralyze.”

In my alternative state I have a theory that the Island of Writers
is the mole people living in the tunnels under New York City.

Our Earth is their stars.