A tender and beautiful poem for the morning.
by Sue Vincent
If I could dream a dawn
Into existence
It would wear your face
In its sleep.
If I could dream a morning
It would wake to your breath,
A pillowed silhouette against the dawn,
The space between filled with warmth
And the tenderness
Of tangled legs…
(Continue Reading: Dreamer)
I wasn’t supposed to talk to strangers, which is why I never told my mum about the man below the bridge. She wouldn’t have tolerated him with his frayed coat and dirty fingers. His eyes had a little shine in them, even in the shadows, as if he’d left a light on inside his head.
After my chores, I’d ask mum for jam sandwiches, biscuits, and a sliced apple for a tea party with my friend under the bridge. She thought the old fellow was a fairy child, flitting in my imagination like a moth, and she liked me out from under her feet.
My doll, Miss Penny, and I would tote our basket down the hill and tiptoe across the stepping-stones. My friend waited in our castle’s cool darkness while I propped Miss Penny up against the wall and brewed pretend tea. We’d share our feast and sip from invisible cups as proper as the queen. Miss Penny always smiled, enjoying the party as much as we. Then he’d tell us stories of his travels to India and Africa, of riding elephants, and diving for pearls, and climbing mountains in the snow. One day, Miss Penny decided to stay in the castle under the bridge to keep my friend company.
Then, my mum packed us up, and we moved to America.
That was forty years ago.
My husband is golfing with colleagues, and I have a precious morning to wander through the old haunts of my tender years. I rent a car for a drive into the country. The old home is still there, smaller and empty. The roof sags and ivy consumes the sunny walls. But it isn’t the home I’ve come to visit. I tote my basket, my jam sandwich, biscuits, and apple down the hillside and tiptoe across the stones through the stream.
I know my friend isn’t there, but the eight-year-old child inside me hopes anyway. I hear his stories whisper from the castle beneath the bridge, in the brook and trees, in summer’s heated air, and I find his bones, Miss Penny still smiling in his arms.
**
Thanks once again to Sue Vincent for her wonderful Thursday photo prompt. Visit her at The Daily Echo and join the fun.
The reaper perches on her bedpost, obsidian feathers secreted in the ebony of night. Below him, the woman lies supine, one leg extended, toes pointed. Her thin arms arch upward in a dream, supple as wings in spite of the brittleness of her bones. He understands her grace, the persistence of her soul’s dance.
Moderato e maestoso. Her lips part as Tchaikovsky swells in her head. The scène finale. The reaper cranes forward, immersed in the sublime pathos of the song. She dips her chin in gratitude, elegant white feathers and fingers cupping her heart. The reaper weeps and splays his black wings. Her dream ripples across the lake and she glides into the golden light, forever a swan.
**
Thanks to Sue Vincent of the Daily Echo for another mesmerizing #writephoto Thursday prompt.
When I was a child, I could fly
you and I hopped in dirt-road afternoons
faithful
and the dust-wind flung us over seas of wheat
scuffed shoes skimming the feathered awns
we whipped around the corners of the barn
in a home-sewn world of farm-hewn hands
our secret futures soared
In the veins of my hands
the blue brooks of time stream by
Somewhere on the way, I unlearned how to fly
and trod worn paths through autumn’s lea
snapped night’s brittle ice
shards of fractured faith
glinting in my wake
Today’s morning purls in plumrose
cast on a withering season’s stark debris
spangled with winter’s gilded rime
a new path of violet ice wends to the horizon
fragile, fissured, a wish yet unbroken
my secret future soars
faithful
and I wonder if I might fly
one last time
This attempt at poetry was in response to Sue Vincent’s weekly photo prompt. Check out other submissions on The Daily Echo and maybe try the next one! Thank you, Sue. ❤
Sue Vincent #writephoto
We gathered at the border of the road, called out of our misery by one of the children. The dawn bled, a bruised and bloody wound. How fitting for the sixth extinction.
Yet, it was a dawning.
I had thought, long before the die-off, that we might poison the planet and arise one morning in disbelief that we couldn’t survive on an obliterated world. Or perhaps disease would usher mankind to the pyres, our super-viruses ravaging our weak and chemical-laden bodies. Of course, mutual annihilation was a possibility, the promise of our youth and sum of our talent and treasure dedicated to war. The end always made for entertaining speculation.
Who would have believed the culprit was time, all spiraling down with the slow ticking of the clock, the December of the human race.
I peered at the upturned faces of our isolated band as the heavens thrust spears of light through the clouds’ closing gash. My companions’ bodies appeared to glow in the rare sunlight, their radiant souls shining through, reclaiming lost beauty. In their smiles, I witnessed the dawning of hope and hadn’t the heart to tell them we were ghosts.
**
Thanks to Sue Vincent of The Daily Echo for another enticing photo prompt. She tosses these out to us on Thursdays and reblogs our submissions. It’s great fun. Head over and give it a try!
Sue Vincent of The Daily Echo once again provided a lovely photoprompt to fire our creativity. Thank you, Sue.
The passage stretched longer than the old priest promised. A final door scraped open into a rectangular crypt, fluted arches interwoven in the dimness. Cobwebs luffed like gossamer sails as the air stirred. Eight slender columns splayed their stone fingers, supporting the vaulted ceiling, its paint flaking from the solemn faces of watchful gods.
In three rows lay the stone sarcophagi of dead kings, their likenesses carved into the dusty lids along with narrow slots for their spirits to breathe. The princess gazed straight ahead, whispering a prayer as she walked between the ancestral corpses, skeletal reminders of her royal lineage and her father’s impending doom.
Myths of the Mirror 