Tag: creation

Categories
Creative Writing Poetry

Taken, granted

Beholding the embodiments of words that I’ve written is a peculiarity, and I know even more firmly

That it is, but isn’t up to me.

It really isn’t, and yet I’m given free rein

To make sacred spaces, in places like my heart

Or in the garden of an old house with withering birch trees obscuring its front.

A herald on the wind, lilacs by the walk –

See the light as you enter in, under the arbor,

Into an abode I was given, to make it my own and His –

For nothing other than the holy reasons of love and goodness.

Categories
Poetry Thoughts and Entries

Sympathetic

I found a beetle in the boat, laying flat on his back, wiggling his meaty, spindly legs in the air, trying to grasp something – anything – to right his shiny, swollen body.

Slowly, he stopped straining and scrambling on the carpeted floor of the docked pontoon and just lay there, little feet in the air.

He reminded me of myself when I try Pilates.

Pathetic,

I thought, sympathetically.

Categories
Poetry

Meadowgrass

I’ll sow a field with seeds

Of grass that doesn’t need cutting, and doesn’t want it, either.

Growing in soft-edged clusters laying sweet and green on the ground,

Letting itself be combed by the snakes and the rain –

Combed into cowlicks where deer may make their beds.

Categories
Thoughts and Entries

Tonight, I walked the dog

It is a cloudless and windless night in winter. Stepping out from under the roof, I walk across the asphalt and into the dark.

Crunching across the ice-glazed driveway, it hits me: the moaning roar of the highway that echoes across the quieted, bared suburbs and frozen landscape.

The sound grows louder for a few moments, and washes over me a wave of timidity. I realize that it is the first time today that I am not enclosed by walls; the only solid thing near me is the ground that I stand on.

I look in the opposite direction of it, and both up and down vanish – the immensity of the sky and the distance of the lights that dapple it make the smallness (but not insignificance) of such concepts clear.

My eyes search for the familiar; I find Orion and, surprising myself, recognize the Pleiades. Do they acknowledge me, and name me, too? I’m not sure if I even want them to. It would depend on the nature of their characters, wouldn’t it?

Though they are so far, it still matters to me.

Categories
Thoughts and Entries

Thoughts in Autumn

I think that the trees are happy in autumn. Their heavy cloaks are cast off, and their lanky, springy arms stretch a little higher than before. Their simple forms are on delightful view – branches pierce the cold air, and brown bark starkly contrasts with the frosted sky of the season. Moreover, they have sweet rest; rest from the hasty making and consuming of food, and instead live contentedly on wealth already stored up. They will soon exist in numb half-consciousness that renders the weighty, cold snow not a burden, but a divine embrace; a heavenly, chilling covering in exchange for a green, earthly one.

Gustav Fjaestad, Hoarfrost and Stars
Categories
Stories

A Bird in the Park

I’m swimming in earth and can’t move. The trees and grass are overpoweringly green, the stones in the ground golden and blue, depending on where the sun is in the sky. In this noonday light, my skin looks more radiant than it really is, and my cheeks are warmer than in the average given moment.

I am confused, like some roots that unexpectedly exit the ground, assume they will become a tree, then become increasingly bewildered as they only form into what is known as a lump, as a sore thumb.

God, get me out of here.

A golden-crowned kinglet hops over, pecking the earth as it goes; every leaf or root with a meal, it kisses. I can move now, and step closer.

It does not run; it even comes closer, as if I have something to offer. Really, I have nothing but admiration and awe, to observe how this sphere of feathers and flight moves alongside me, and how easily it flies, yet not fleeing from me.

Do I? I do. I reach in order to tentatively touch, and with the back of my index finger, stroke the down between its wings. I have done nothing, yet everything, and I am happy.

I eventually leave, as is necessary, but I am still in the park in my mind.

It was not wrong to reach out, nor was it reproachable to touch a willing creature, but do others think the same? Do they know what I’ve seen? As far as I could tell, the bird was well, and could not have harmed me, nor I it.

Oh, how I long for things to be right and to be won.

Categories
Favorites Poetry

Story Boards

I would like to know why people paint over pine,

And conceal the grains of growth that betray

The time at which a trunk was split, at what angle it was severed,

Forming ellipses where limbs were once born – the wombs from whence they grew.

Categories
Poetry

Volume

Just see things move in space,

The roadside grass flashing by;

The shapes in the distance crawling along.

Feel lenses stretch and shrink to focus first on the raindrop residue on the window

And then on a cloud in the exact same spot, thousands of feet away,

Whirling in grand pinnacles and arches and mountains in the air.

See how the shapes of the spaces between branches change as you move through them,

How light shifts and humidity fluctuates and temperature varies;

Even your own form and mind morph – how could things get boring for us?

Let’s strive to reverse that.

Categories
Poetry

Small fry

You may be a perfectly pretty fish, but I’ll have to throw you back –

You’re not the minimum span (and I don’t have a license off the bat).

Go grow, little fish! I’ll be back for you

With your spines so splayed in fear;

I’ll let your gold-green scales gleam true

For at least another year.

Categories
NYC Poetry

Tudor Spring

Magnolia wafts over the way from the South Park’s two trees, only one of which has blossomed.

A little fat fly buzzes past my ear,

The sycamore trees are green with afternoon –

Spring is here, for a short while to stay;

Yes, summer is coming all too soon.

Sparrows spring to perch by one another as the branches beneath them bounce –

They hop higher to the top of the tree, a burst of new life they announce.

I spy a chickadee among them on the uppermost branch –

He flutters away and leads all but one, who rests for a little while longer,

The fresh budding boughs his shroud.