Prompts Hour Eight
Text Prompt
Try and condense the plot of a book, any book, into a poem. It can be very direct and recognizable, or abstract and obscured.
Prompt contributed by Evelyn K. Parrish.
Image Prompt
No.7 – The injections
No. 7 – The Injections
By Nandhini G. Natarajan
The little girl contracted an infection
and needed daily injections
for a whole year.
Her aunt,
a doctor
brought the injections home.
Every evening,
the girl laid on her side scared,
and she whimpered.
But she stopped crying
when everyone said,
what a brave girl she was,
and she felt proud.
A game soon evolved
around the girl’s shots,
which she hated.
After she was injected,
Aunt would pretend
to inject her brother,
his eyes looked so big
when he was scared.
But he was quickly
reassured,
and embraced.
The little girl would stand
rubbing her butt.
She would cry.
Look at me; it hurts
I’m so brave!
But no one heard.
Her scream was inside.
She was silent.
She was invisible.
Hour Seven 2021
What is Normal? One of my favorite lines from one of my favorite songs is, He not busy being born is busy dying Is there a normal? When people say, 'the new normal' it's a cop-out. Yeah, I'll keep one of my wife's handcrafted masks around my neck for a while. 'Let's go back to normal,' others say. Really? what is that? Like saying, 'It's always been that way.' There is no normal. My uncle eats three cookies for breakfast every day. He has farmed his forty acres for sixty years. Eating a midnight meal is normal for me. YThis peaceful feeling inside is wonderful, but it's not normal.
Phoenicia: Ancestor to the Phoenix of the Rising Sun Hour 1
Hour 1
Phoenicia: Ancestor to the Phoenix of the Rising Sun
To embody a mythical creature who would it be?
One who lived in cycles of 500 years… witnessing the brutality of slavery and the birth of a nation once born free.
She with an immortal spirit that soars in the skies and will rise from the flames of humanities pain and greed.
One whose tears heal those that inspire true creativity.
A mystery revered by cultures of long ago.
Egyptian, Persian, Greco Roman, and Jewish mythology to name a few.
Her feathers if discovered heal the wounded and give birth to an eternal flame of hope that can only be sired in the depth of one’s heart…
She who is intuitive enough to sense her own demise.
Shrouded in a nest of Cinnamon, Sage and Myrrh… she heals herself almost extemporaneously.
Some think she will perish or burn under the pressure of flames, not knowing she has thrived and survived on the fire from within …a passion that ignites her, excites her, and mystifies.
Some think that she will be destroyed, yet she knows that she will come back anew.
Wiser, stronger, deeper, richer, to heighten her conscious mind and beating heart.
Her vision cannot be extinguished by the flames, only intensified.
She has an inner cool that prevents her sacred feathers form charring. This pressure only deepens her colors, her determination to bring light to the depth of those that find a remnant of her feathered kind.
She is rare. She is beauty personified, not due to her multicolored hues, but to her lightness and grace. She barely grazes the earth. A pretty painted butterfly of the sky that flies with eagles and hawks, too multifaceted and high-minded to linger long among the flowers and trees protected by the earth’s gravitas pull.
If you spot her try to capture her attention, for like the oracle of truth, she may be attracted to a depth that she sees in you… she will stare in your eyes and pierce through to your soul if you can withstand her gaze long enough not be caught up in the cosmos nebula of her eyes, you just may connect on level not known to most.
A mythical bird…
A flaming peacock…
Tears that heal…
Fire in flames…
Cinnamon, Sage, and Myrrh…
Forever Young…
An old soul.
A sense of home.
Ancestors blessing.
Who is she really?
She is immortal and she intends to herald a new age of rebirth. She brings a masculine energy that is imbued with her feminine touch. Strength and Sensitivity are equally matched.
She is the epitome of masculine and feminine energies in-tune, ready to usher in a new age of understanding. Some mistake her for the peacock with its cool hues of luscious larimar, hints of aquamarine, healing turquoise, royal violets, the height of the chakras awakening the most delicate of lavender, and heavenly baby sky blues. From underneath she glistens in shades of moonlit silver and starlight when you see her fly from above as she glides in the night sky and morning breeze.
Yet, if you were to view her from a mountain top view and look below you would see that her feathers take on a whole different hue.
Hazel eyes that illuminate a warm transparent glow much like a candle flickering in the night sky, like an opaque brown hazel nut shell built up of delicate layers of a translucent mother of pearl imbedded with a light layer of rainbow topaz. Her feathers are bolder and are warm shades of skin complexion, flecked with kisses of deeper brown freckles and shadows of mahogany, cinnamon, turmeric, merlot, papaya, and hints of the deepest black …that is what you will see from your aerial view.
One in two she appears cool from below in all her silvers and blues, but if you are at her level you will be enveloped by her warmth. If you should be blessed enough to look at her from above, at a summit higher than the rest, all you will witness is a glimmer of gold. Gold and silver are the colors she wears best from above or below interchangeably… perhaps you might even mistake her for a coppery rose gold if you both meet on the same level, she will defy gravity like an optical illusion.
Perhaps she will leave a feather behind a mystical symbol of hope. Keep it close to your heart. It will remind you of the hope and depth that you have inside.
This is the year of the Phoenix, the beginning of the end has already occurred, it’s time to live life anew. Embrace the way of the Phoenix. Her fragrance the scent of clean cinnamon spice, fire, wood like cedar or fig and, honey may linger. She evokes the deepest sense of memory, yet it is her presence that one seeks.
Normal
Normal
Not now or never again will life be Normal!
Objection, I’d like to call you out on that. Explain Normal?
Right..am okay..let’s see…before Covid-19 everything was normal!
May I once again object? Each and every one of us is different not normal!
All I’m trying to say is life before to me felt normal
Let’s just say, were all in the same storm with different boats.
Normal as such pre Covid for me was a crazy rush.
Out every night at a different hobby, sometimes two or three on the same night
Normal during covid was difficult to navigate,
From crazy busy to Nothing – there lay the struggle
Btu! We learn to adapt. Some people don’t like changes, I get that.
Our circumstance now should be, life as we see it now is normal.
What happened pre covid-19 is history.
8th Hour – Two Old Women
Two old women got into a spat
One left the room, the other just sat
Who was winner of this argument?
The one who stayed or the one who went?
What does it matter who really wins?
Two old women no longer are friends
A Diamante in the Rough – Hour 7
Normal
Ordinary, Typical
Mediocre, Average, Expected
Commonplace, Lacks Courage, One of a Kind, Takes Risks
Outstanding, Unconventional, Exceptional
Extraordinary, Special
Remarkable
Why normal?
The animals flourished as the humans shrank away.
Maybe some of the comebacks were exaggerated
– dolphins didn’t really swim in the Venice canals, did they? –
but the bears were free to roam in Yosemite,
species that had been declared extinct suddenly emerged again,
whales and dolphins could hear each other’s ocean songs.
At night the stars emerged brightly in a clear dark sky.
After all the sadness and sacrifice of the pandemic,
why do we hustle back to cruise lines and long commutes
when instead we ourselves could flourish
in a New Normal where
birds sing loudly with great joy and
we are there
to hear them.
Seeing God through a Brother
Seeing God through a Brother
Everyone has a name for hunger in his mother’s tongue.
My Asian friend asked me in a chat what it’s called.
I typed ‘ebi.’ He sent a voice note and distorted
the pronunciation to mean vomit.
It was normal for the belly to reject a meal. Not anymore.
The once filled library in my home town cries of hunger.
I realized my stomach’s mouth is becoming
wide and I give it to a seamstress to stitch it
into the pocket size of a beggar.
Every expression could be art but not a poem.
In a poem, not all expressions are poetic.
It is poetic to say I begged a bird for a grain
and staked my future, not birthright.
What is birthright if the holder’s body no longer holds air?
I understand when people do not speak of empty stomachs
because it was written: man must live not by food alone.
Today, must be fed to see beyond.
It is normal these days to look at a brother
and see a god_who is also a provider.