Buttercup Sun Day

The prompt at the Poetry Jam is to write about things looking up. This instantly came to mind:















Buttercup Sun Day

When things look down,
Look up;

That's a yellow buttercup
Hanging in the sky,

A welcome to an eye
Attuned to looking down,

Where every smile's a frown,
And every lifted brow

Becomes a worried scowl.
Better up, my friend,

Than down, for in the end,
It's up where solace lies --

It's hanging in the skies.





- Posted by Karen

Rust

Look at the rust,
How it spreads like lichens
Over overlapping tin,
Turning panels rich red
Brown and bluish gray
And dusty black,
Until it grits the metal surface
To coarse sand and turns edges
Toward the sun like petals.
See the rust
That trims the drying buds
Of roses silent curled,
Paper-veined and thin,
Self-contained and beaten
By the peeling brown.
Listen to the creaking rust
Of threaded cap and pipe,
Complicit as they hold to one another.
Look at your rusty hair
Gone thin and white, my skin
Blooming with the creeping rust of age.
See us turn toward the sun
And hold to one another, complicit
In the silence of our veins.

- Posted by Karen

Thirst

THIRST


It's in the way the rain falls
     in sharp, inexorable drops

until the world is long lines,
     stitching sky to earth.

It's in the driving needles
     that push hungry fawns to group
          and bed beneath the drooping birch.

It's in the urge that makes them
     nuzzle sodden earth, returning,

 little by little, through a new washed world
     in certainty  and wonder

in search of tender shoots.

On Looking at a Photo of Robert Frost

  

 On Looking at a Photo of Robert Frost

Who would have thought

     that Frost,

who looks

      in all the books

like some grand father,

 who cleaned the spring
      in spring

and stopped in winter woods --

who, looking at this white-haired

     gentle man

        
would ever think
     that he,

 who knew that walls

     can't stand,

but built them anyway,

this white haired gentle man --

who would have thought
      that even he,

would be acquainted

     with the night

like me?

 

Pyre

The Poetry Jam challenge is to write an elegy. This doesn't fit the bill, but it is about death, and I already had it in the works. Go to the Jam (click on the pic on my sidebar) and read more. For that matter, look below this poem for another about death. Cheerful, aren't I?


















When I burn low--
Cooling off with age
So that the fires of life
Are full too strong to be,

When I am bent --
Drawn unto the earth
So that the narrow bed
Is all the world I see,

When I dissolve --
Sift away through time
So nothing else is left
Except what's best of me,

When I am loosed --
Clay begun to shed
So I am but a mark
In someone's memory,

Then let me sail alone,
Untethered by regret
Burning in the night,
Grateful to be free.