…and there were lilies: VI Belladonna

The last in the “and there were lilies series” – the epilogue to last year’s “jubilate lilium“.
I’ve never had much luck with the classic pink “naked lady” lily, but the white one could be a bridal bouquet all on it’s own.

 

Summer’s parting gift –
a bouquet tossed over her
shoulder as she leaves.

Brittlegums III

Once again their silvered skins
have dropped in disorderly curls,
like shed gowns, pooling at their feet.

 

It’s the last day of summer, and the brittle gums are well into shedding their bark. First they go from silver to dark grey, then the old bark peels off exposing the new white bark underneath. It’s hardly a spectacular autumn change, but it’s a marker of the changing seasons still.      

come with me?

For dVerse’s quadrille #122 prompt “going… going… gone poeming” 
The challenge: exactly 44 words, must include the word ‘go’.

 

I could step into my imagination,
and close the door behind me.

But if you want to,
you can come too.
Just take my hand
and step through…
we can go anywhere you want.

But quickly, close the door,
before they see we’ve gone!

Monday morning ha’sonnet: WFH

Isolation
does have some good
compensations,
for how else could
I sleep ‘til eight,
have breakfast late
and be on time!

telling stories II: only tell your stories to strangers

Be careful what you turn into words,
and who you give those words to.
You never know what they might do to it –
how they’ll scuff or chip or stain it,
so that it’s never quite bright and clean,
never quite perfect, again.

telling stories I: just words

“I’ll talk it all to pieces if I have to tell about it. Then it’s gone, and when I try to remember what it was really like, I remember only my own story”. Snufkin (‘The Spring Tune’, Tove Jansson)

Let me give you a moment of my time –
a memory,
a story –
all that I saw, heard, felt..
how it was
(well, at least how it was for me)
turned to words, as best I can.

stuck in the middle, by blue

For dVerse’s prompt: ‘true colours‘.
The challenge was to write from the point of view of a colour…

All across space,
we travel as a pack,
none draws ahead
and none lags back.
But once we meet
an interface
ah, that changes,
how we race.

gluttony

white light blazes down
from a sky of purest hottest blue,
drawing out sweat
that tickles, trickles,
slicking skin
and stinging scratches,

Why the windows are sealed

This is for dVerse’s Thursday Meet the Bar prompt “Setting“. I read the prompt when I got into the office this morning (time zone difference!), let it ferment throughout the working day, and this is what bubbled up… 

Oh and I should acknowledge that I lifted the phrase “rigor mortis of routine” from the Human Anvil’s ‘encore encore‘. It stuck in my mind when I read it, and has been sleeping there, waking whenever I unlock my office door.

The relentless hum of air-conditioning,
which neither cools nor moves the air,
is punctuated by the whine and click of a photocopier,
as voices, muted to an unintelligible muttering
penetrate the two-tone sage-green wall,

0400, fairy ring

For dVerse’s Tuesday Poetics “let’s have fun, guys”.
0400 (4am) is the worrying hour, when all the mental fungi bloom. 

White threads of worry have spread
from the tiny spores of doubt that
drifted in during the day,
lodging unnoticed in my mind.