I drift on an opalescent breeze
dreams flower in my hair
They shed in heaps of autumn leaves
rust and gold and green
I am traveling far from childhood
where dreams were never welcome
against transparent skies
I cast my tattered shadow
A Mayan goddess taking flight
thrumming ancient wings
art by Karal Bak
I feel you in the pouring rain
violent or soft as a breeze.
A distant star you fade into
the night from which you came.
Wounded hearts are slow to heal
but I have become indifferent to pain.
Sweet gardenias fill my rooms with mortality
decaying petals soaked in secrets
rhapsodize my dreams with the zephyr of your sigh.
We are a wasteland, all poetic breath died with us.
I long for the scent of earth infused with deep roots,
the soothing sounds of swaying wind chimes clinging
to the limb of a live oak,
soothing sounds for the twilight hours.
Communing with birds
I open my empty palms
expecting metaphors to light
like fireflies on my life line.
From the back of my eyes
I can see the river Delta,
sweet green tarpaulin stretched
across the hemisphere and those
deep murky waters that reflect
a silver sky.
Fleeting memories disperse like clouds.
Just before sleep I sink deep
into illusory havens,
escape the boredom of life.
Metaphor and Allegory by Ju-Yu Chen
Waiting for you became a ritual,
listening for the sound of your footsteps
in the pounding rain.
The taste of salt still remains
upon my lips where you left it
and in dreams you are evoked
by the wings of seabirds where I have
pressed our memory.
At daybreak the tide retreats without
leaving you at my shore and it is
there I accept loss.
At the hollow of my throat I have etched
your name somehow declaring us sacred.
I’ve unfolded us like origami
Ripped apart our borders
Dissected the shadowed corners
of secrets, forced them into
the light to mourn like the hollow
bones of birds,
I have renamed us where every
memory is not an ache beneath my ribs
and every thought is not an assault on the dead.
My heart is the flush of peony
the color of healing scars.
Thank you Free Verse Revolution!
In the sweet summer
below the rusty fasteners of
an old swing I pump the air
with the spindly legs of childhood,
dream my wide eyed dreams of whirling
pathways to the beckoning sun.
My heart leaps at the sight of a brilliant
rainbow and with small fingers I reach up
to swathe its colors over a bluepalette sky.
Now I know about life,the real truth of it.
Now I know the swing is just freedom.
Summer scatters her shades
in daring colors of red and green
asymmetrical patterns splayed
over fledgling birds taking wing
above silent fields and late blooms
of lilac the deep blush of peony
clinging to a bowing trellis.
A flicker of burnished feathers
dripping with dew flitting above
rolling wheat fields.
Bowed stalks laden with crusty leaves
tender stems beaten to the soil
in need of assurance
the promise of rebirth.
Kabegami Art
Folded beneath white caps
shards of crystals stack in layers.
Seaweed tentacles abandon their grip,
letting go of their bed they are
swept away by the tide snared by sea oats
stranded in the dunes.
A shroud of melon melts down the vista.
Seafaring specters bob in the distance
drifting apparitions that vanish
in the haze, lost to the horizon.
Seagulls hover between sea and sky,
wingtips graze the watery glass,
skimming, plunging, their throaty caws
console the lonely sea.
Near daybreak, my eyes close,
my mind steps down into our most
beloved poem
*In a dark time the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade …
I look out upon our desperate gardens.
A raven sits motionless on the branch
of a skeleton tree greedily eyeing the
tiny lark all feathers and bone.
In the state between sleep and wake
I traverse birth and mortality,
the faintest hint of earthy candles
sweeps the orb of my celestial dreaming
a sensation of pearls like tiny moons
falling from my open palms ,
and you, whose sigh is a strophe
of sonnets, waits far at the boundary,
not a spirit or rose tinged snow
but flesh and bone and sinew.
Alone, now I am sleeping less,
roused by the wing beats of Boreal Owls
circling ancient Cypress trees
their screech a fist of wind with knife edge
talons erupt through feathery curtains,
breech my seclusion,
dark traces that vibrate my hemispheres.
A lofty breeze lifts me over the valley
to a moonlit hillside of sweet lea.
There an ivory fox lies down beside me.
He is the scent of ripe wheat fields
his eyes are the color of the eastern sky.
*In A Dark Time by Roethke
