7 posts tagged “photographs”

I meet this winter without celebration,
as the man who was dying, but now lives,
greets the ants that pass through his kitchen
in narrow, undisturbed rows.

When the child with her crown of candles
comes to my door in her white dress, singing,
I watch the delicate notes disperse in pale
cold light, like snow.

 

St. Lucia Day @ Wikipedia
"Santa Lucia" in Sweden @ Holidays & Festivals Around the World

Illness is a kind of winter. It strips the green, leaving only the bare, peeling branches of your life; but it opens the sky. The view widens. It is a new season, only that. You know it will get colder. You know ice is coming. You retreat indoors; inside.

Reading MFK Fisher, I see that I know nothing, really, of pain; and less of those who live with -- who love -- the person in pain.

I am in a between place. I feel change coming -- which, I suppose, is appropriate to the season. I sit on the deck, alone, late in the night, smoking in the snow.

I shall accept T.'s offer of a tree, cut from his property in advance of the power company saws. We will put it on the deck, and decorate it with icicle lights and the Buddhist prayer flags K. gave me for my birthday. I will welcome this solstice and whatever darkness and light it brings.

I don't know who I am. I am no-one. I am a dark vessel, waiting.

"I think that many people want to write, but of them few have the will to. I write more than half the things I do or say or think. I can see the words on the sheet of paper and see the pen writing them. And in my head a voice, a kind of silent reading voice, reads them not from but to the paper. Often what is read is good. There is a quick sureness about some phrases. At times they come too patly, with a smart-aleck tone. But I don't write. I write a few letters, which grow less interesting as I age. But that is all. It is because I am lazy, and that is true of most of the people who think in prose. Laziness and a vague fear."

    MFK Fisher    Stay Me, Oh Comfort Me: journals and stories 1933-1941

I can't believe I signed up for yet another one-post-a-day-for-a-month project. But since I did, here's a squirrel for you:

  This week's prompt was If these walls could talk:

This house speaks.
Floorboards groan,
walls crack like
lightening bolts.

Windows insist
Wash me! Snow-
melt drips, drips,
from the eves.

Paintings proclaim
blue, green, gold;
they announce
Alaska, New Mexico,

Pennsylvania. Listen,
you can hear wings:
parakeets, iron angels,
carved wood goddesses

from Thailand and Bali.
Icarus. New Guineau.
This glass whispers
Czechoslovakia.

A flowered bowl blooms
China. Beads cry Africa!
That sheepskin says: home,
here, mountain, Montana.

 

. . . but here's a squirrel for you: