And Just

Image by Yi Ching Lin

and just

and just
overnight, three-
quarters of the
moon had
fallen, carefully
color-filtering
the streets, adding
a silvery
spine
to each
weary tree
.

Yi Ching Lin

Posted over on her site Yi's Bits

Dorothy

Image borrowed from Bing

Dorothy

Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz hits the teenage years:

Sure I don't want to go to the Emerald City anyway,
the yellow brick road is for babies and girls with bows in their hair.

I'm going to ditch the lion, the scarecrow and the Tin Man, they could ruin a girl's street cred.

Well, maybe I could keep the Tin Man, he looks a bit like a street theatre act, as long as he doesn't sing or...rust.

I won't go down the yellow brick road, I'll go down this urban path, it looks way more interesting and like there may be a party or something actually happening at the end of it.

Us teenagers wait a yawn of years for something to actually happen...
Aunt Em is so smothering somehow, I don't need her anymore, that bun in her hair makes me feel responsible for her.
I can't be responsible for every one's happiness.

I'm going to take the pigtails out and have rock chick hair. The dress goes first chance - blue gingham, what was I thinking? I'll wear leather or denim, or both if I feel like it.
The ruby slippers can stay, they are cool in a retro way.

So, I'll take the urban path and avoid the broken glass and empty booze bottles. If I don't see them, they are not there.
I'll ring Aunt Em when I get settled, not that I'll miss her or anything or want to hear her voice....
just to stop that voice in my head that says,

'There's no place like home'.


Brigid O'Connor

Posted over on her site Sort of Writing
Listed as #34 over on Magpie Tales 51

Vertex into Vortex

Image borrowed from Bing

Vertex in the Vortex

In your forest primeval
Hairy prickly trunks
Rise up side by side
From rank fern fronds
With sticky palms open
Onto swelling blossoms
Sending unctuous jam
Into vast vaporous skies.

Mother mucks Sky Father up
Whose pointy vertex peak
Is swallowed in her vortex,
That spiral fluid in her restricted
Itching crawly roomy space.

Is it vortex’ spark in vertex?
Or what, or what, or what next?
Oh words of aerial mountain
Dip into her green-shadow pool
Float like milky flower-blooms
Bamboo thickets all abound
Fecund stagnant lands alive.
And then it disolves……………

David Gilmour

Clinkers

Image borrowed from Bing

Clinkers.

Bricks and tiles and pottery turned
With clay sand our fingers learned.
Then what’s amazing,
We invented glazing!
But sometimes even bricks get burned!

Stafford Ray

Posted down under on his site Stafford Ray
Listed as #13 over on Magpie Tales 51

Love Song Chlorus

Image borrowed from Yahoo

Love Song Chlorus

Since the dusky dawn primeval
when great mossy giants greened out
the sun, when all the forests bristled
and stood dense, trunk to trunk,
branches intertwining with fellowship,
there have been sapian-homo
despite their bellicose natures, who knew
exactly how to find the sky;
looking up beyond the canopy
at a green horizon, where those ancient gods
of chlorus gave us emerald green sunsets,
fifty verdant shades, so vibrant, so inviting
that yesterday cousin reptiles journeyed far
from the dankest depths of a grey-green
seething sea, tired of the darkness
and the danger, and squirmed up proud
onto the land, and one breath at a time
learned to live outside of the fetal soup,
struggling to first stand erect,
and then claim the planet for habitat,
barely noticing the others
that followed; but in a quantum blink
we stood blocked, shoulder to shoulder,
like too many rodents in our boxes and
concrete canyons, with the skree
of the trampled unheard, and the flesh
of our neighbors still in our canines, as
we seemed to forget that our tails
had not fallen off in vain, and the grand
green scheme of things was not, is not
random,

for we need to return to our green truth,
remember our roots, celebrate mold
on sun-bleached bones, tarter on teeth,
kelp scum on driftwood, and the macabre
beauty of rot as epidermis and pulp
decompose and make their way home,
past the expressway of magma, back
to the earth’s vertex, its green steaming womb,
and accept the irrefutable evidence that
it is not too late to make love
to the girl with the green eyes.

Yes, rebirth can be our reward
for partnering up with our loving planet,
whirling green in a cold universe;
just let the legions tramp by
with their lethal pilum held high,
lie peacefully in the clover and wildflowers,
heart full to bursting with green fire,
arms wide open to the sun of grass,
listening to the ladybugs who already know
hell and war and revolution
are not green.

Glenn Buttkus

February 2011

Listed as #37 over on Magpie Tales 51

Would you like to listen to the Author read this poem to you?

Revolution

Image borrowed from Yahoo

Revolution

Amid the acrid dust, the nervous calls.
Movement and paralysis, holding hands
Along the line of emblematic palls,
In folds, to dress the children of these lands.
Today, streets move to dodge the stinging light,
High-rise history falls to hopeful hearts,
Collective breath, exhaled like birds in flight,
A feathered consciousness, displayed in parts.
Airwaves, are jammed with frantic freedom cries,
While power shifts its weight in fevered throes.
Reverberating chants draw down the skies,
And use the blue, to ink a nation's prose.
Democracy is traded in great halls,
While truth is written large, across your walls.

Martin T. Hodges

Posted over on his site Square Sunshine
Posted as #17 over on Magpie Tales 51

Middle of the Road

Image by Tess Kincaid

Middle of the Road


Step across your side
and meet me in the fallow;
come with the innocence
of a freshly laid egg.

Do not mind the cracks
and crevasses; if your foot
lands on one, it will not break
your mother’s back.

Quick, before the thin edge
of the wedge becomes deep;
prime the seed, like a pump,
with a feathered whisper.

Be brilliant, talk yourself into it;
wipe the yolk from your face
and move to the soft center,
flip your sunny side up.


Tess Kincaid

January 2011

Posted over on her site Willow Manor
Listed as #1 over on Magpie Tales 51