24 Poems ~ 24 Hours
The calm wind, the calm sea
The flipping hair of the young lady
The intense violin played in the air
What else does it mean but pure bliss and care
When life gets unfair gets tough ain’t square
Just remember that your life is a gift which is rare
Go back to the place where the sea and the wind
And the violin played in whirlwind
She stood by the window
Confined to a cell she once chose
Dusk turning to dawn
she watched the frost fall off the daffodils
Hope, new life
She dropped her bottle in the sink
as the whiskey drank the drain
The screen door shuttered behind her
She carried herself toward the field
Opened her arms
As the wind played the telephone
lines like a fiddle
Whisking through the open field
Each step toward who she used to be
Away from the woman she lost
A prisoner unrecognized,
that shared her name
As the sunrise called her
She followed the horizon
Freedom
Remembering Grandma
I was so young
You so wise
wish I could remember your eyes.
Grandps died
cancer came
you suffered
til it won the game (of life)
I thought I had a bunch of Irish in my veins
I swore I did
until the DNA test
So now only a pipsqueak possibility
way less than 1%
But that doesn’t stop me from telling that
I once saw a man smoking his pipe
upside down in the rain
(the pipe not the man)
and that seemed very Irish
so I’m sticking with that
DEAR MARY
“I fail to see what the Moderns are supposed to have discovered about color.”
Mary Cassatt (letter to Berthe Morisot & her daughter Julie Manet, autumn 1879)
I’ve never met a color I didn’t love, but what you? All this bother about discovering color makes me nervous. As if painting was a game of one-upmanship. Who’s got the best/most/clearest/sincerest/most outrageous perception. As if we all see/saw things the same way as each other.
And I can’t help but wonder if there’s anything new to explain about say, shades of blue – that you or Renaissance painters didn’t know? The blues in your “Little Girl in a Blue Armchair” don’t strike me as virginal. Your little girl appears thoroughly modern – slouched, legs akimbo as if bored to death of waiting for something – not a Renaissance Madonna. And that lapdog isn’t some lamb in a creche. Nor does he seem stuffed in the painting to show a patron’s wealth. I suspect he’s the family pet.
Maybe your blues aren’t medieval lapis, but let’s be modern. I’d rather be sprawled in those two peacock/cobalt overstuffed chairs than almost anywhere else.
(response to Mary Cassatt, “Little Girl in a Blue Armchair, 1878)
Author’s Note: I don’t have a location special to me, that I haven’t visited in many years so I can’t really do the prompt. However, I can write about a place that is special to me, that I have visited recently. So here it goes. Enjoy.
At the park,
I can both
reminisce about easier times
and focus on the present,
swinging away my problems.
The swings are my designated spot.
Up and up I go.
Down, down I go.
It’s one of the only times
I truly feel invincible.
Like I’m flying
without a care in the world once again.
The wind whispers,
making the trees sing
and soothing my mind.
Even though the traffic outside the park roars,
I can forget for a moment that all that hustle and bustle
is a part of my world,
and at last, I can be free.
In my mind I’m stuck
Back in a time of monsters
With mad gaping maws
Creatures, creep-lovers
Leap down fiery caverns
For lost love or warmth
Searching for the lyrical
Noise of the ancients
Diane Morinich
Butterfly
personified by
Celtic tune
Fiddler strums
the flitting floral dance called
“The Swallowtail Jig”
The stain on your clothes
Don’t reflect your character
Similarly one shouldn’t
Judge a book by it’s cover.
Happiness is not the end result
But a journey of life
Which moves toward any direction
But the approach remains the same, being happy.
Sometimes doing the most random thing brings fulfillment
And not doing the important thing
Brings a devilish smile
On your face.
A room in Arles, walls painted yellow,
yellow for faith and love,
for a newly discovered self
stripped to the waist
in the torrid cicada heat,
the chatter of wings rubbing together
as Vincent with a brush dipped in mauve
fading to grey,
mauve for hope
and grey for intelligence, considers painting
a self-portrait, a grey undercoat for the way
it largesses the mind with jars of glistening fruit
and bridges x’d with sacrifice,
crossings he’d made near Antibes
where light slithers along brackish channels
winding south across les Salins,
the great salt plains where a man can disappear
overnight, just evaporate
like standing water. This story
told about Poseidon, earth shaker
and tamer of wild horses; how he rose
storm-faced from the sea in a chariot
pulled by brine-soaked steeds, grey and dappled
like the horses of the Camargue, the mythical ones
women ride in dreams. Perhaps
he should paint a woman dying a red cloth
dipped five times in madder root
and meadowsweet mixed with oak galls and graith
to set the color, the way red,
red for passion, burns when mixed
with chrome yellow
and he remembers a miner in the Borinage
caught in a fire that scarred his forehead
with a crown of thorns, mouth
fitted with a wooden tongue.
He will paint how worn misshapen shoes today
With a brush dipped in burnt umber,
brown the color of service to others.