Ah!
The cries that ensue
when actions take their logical consequences!
But!
But!
But!
We’re on Earth, you know..
Oh, you might not want to feel the impact of gravity
but if you jump, you will fall.
Suck it up, buttercup.
You did the crime, you get the time.
Rant all you like,
but effect always comes after cause.
It really shouldn’t be such a surprise.
Once,
I’d count down days to him.
My pounding would steal my breath at
the thought of him.
I observe my obsession from a distance
laughing at my absurdity,
thankful to have exorcised such ghosts.
.
Now,
thinking I’m seeing her soon
illuminates my being
with not-so-secret joy.
I acknowledge my obsession
in a collectitivity of compatriots
thankful for opportunities
to rub against greatness.
I’m crafting a world
and living in it.
You’re part of the narrative,
if only,
you were there.
Every day
release some of the pressure,
let the steam of words blow
rising like mist
falling droplets of thought
caught.
You can make room for new
opportunities
ideas
possibilities
to pen
if you drain your brain
daily.
.
.
Lots of poetic devices in action here, as well as good advice. Thanks syl for the image!
Down the hall
voices–
murmurs words of whispered
conversations
I can’t quite hear.
The house is supposed to be
empty,
so I stalk the sound
searching for chatty intruders
their sibilant sussurance
strangely assured for the late hour
and their uninvited status.
In the bathroom,
it comes clear:
the toilet’s talking
to itself.
Hot day.
The mall is packed.
Swimming lessons need a driver
(kids can’t get anywhere by themselves, after all).
Joggers sweating past.
Gas mower chugs obnoxiously around the yard.
I miss the soft swisha-swisha of dad’s old Rotary mower
when summer was gentler
and filled with children’s laughter.
A hundred years ago these fields yielded
grief, fear, bodies, blood, and mud.
Now, wheat dries golden in the sun,
leaves wave in the breeze over crater scars,
While the earth returns bones and bombshells
to the surface: a century of slowly expulsing the detritus of war
extruding shrapnel from its pockmarked body with the new grass.
.
.
Watching the history channel, and amazed to learn that even today, Belgian farmers keep bins in their yards for unexploded shells they find, and the army comes by regularly to collect and destroy them. What a legacy a hundred years later! I’m just finishing Anne Perry’s World War One series which has made trench warfare very vivid.
He says she’s not a pebble.
He says she’s more like an interesting rock formation.
Ah, but rock formations were once mountains
as mountains become pebbles
in time.
.
This mountain fills all we can see
I step this way.
You step that way.
Distance grows until we have disappeared from view.
From where we are now, we can each squish
a mountain between our finger and thumb.
Leaves wave
from tree tops
Some exhuberant,
amazed to greet the sky,
some, more lazily,
wave with sighs
Shawn L. Bird 