Flower fall – tanka

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~~~
curt, sharp-edged light
fells blooms from trees gathering
in an orphaned arc

soughing into pregnant grass
rosy tales of birth and death

~~~

For Dverse Poets Modifiers – Use modifiers in wild and whacky ways 🙂

Canvas of Failure – haiku

Over at the Imaginary Garden with Real Toads the challenge is to do ekphrastic poetry. Ekphrasis comes from Greek and means to use a description of art (the poem) as a rhetorical or imaginative description. With just a single piece of art, the challenge is to find a poem that does not just describe the painting, but how it speaks to me, what stories I find in it.

 

Artist in his Studio by Rembrandt

Tongue-in-cheek haiku

Ugh! Did I paint that?
What was I thinking? Oh hell!
There goes my contract.

~~~

Plain old haiku

Decay seeped from walls
deep into his heart spaces
A desert canvas

~~~

Sensuous Sundays – Moon paeans

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Did you know
that moonlight writes poems
on pages of grass

tales of anguish
paeans to the mundane
arias of joy

now you know why
the dawn finds the blades of grass
drenched in tears

~~~

Stark Reality

(100 word flash fiction)

She eased into the immersive reality machine and touched the power button. Excited and impatient to try out a new software. Utterly untried. Called Stark Reality.

The smell hit her first. Harsh, acrid, almost forgotten. The smell of burning.

Explosions rent the air. Soldiers passed in jeeps shooting randomly.  She turned to flee, tripped and fell.

A deafening thunderclap lifted her off the ground and threw her against a wall. Pain lightning streaked through her body. She could barely see. She tried to feel her face. But where were her hands?

How was she going to reach the power button?

~~~

I wrote this story and went to bed and spent a considerable amount of time thinking about the nature of reality. It seems our bodies are virtual reality machines with our sense organs giving us the input. Our brain is the computer and our mind the software. But all of this is controlled by the Ghost In The Machine who decides when to power on and off (dramatically called birth and death). After powering off, the GITM might find another VR machine and power on again. Who knows? The GITM does this for no other reason than to have an immersive experience, much like we would go on a roller coaster ride 🙂 However, we tend to identify with the machine, the computer, the software, the whole package or even software generated concepts like gender, race, nationality, all the while forgetting that we are none of these. We are here just for the ride 😀 Well, not my thoughts exactly. The mystics have been saying this for centuries 🙂

It’s that time of the week, when one’s mind itches to see the photo prompt that Rochelle faithfully puts up for the eclectic group called Friday Fictioneers. Today’s story is for the prompt below –

PHOTO PROMPT – © Claire Fuller

Sensuous Sundays – Ancient embrace – haiga

Suffering is the new joy

By Bonnie Rose

“Can you walk, sweetheart?”

I say these words to our dog Stella who is dying.   It’s time for breakfast and if she walks from our bed to the kitchen, maybe that will be a sign.  Maybe she will be alright. So I ask her again, “Can you walk?”

As I ask, I remember eleven years of sleeping twisted like a pretzel so the dog could get a good night’s sleep.   I remember mornings, how she rose at dawn and stomped her Pointer’s feet on the mattress to get me up, to flush me out of the brush of sleep as she would a wild quail. Now it’s nine a.m. and she sighs at the foot of the bed, eyes alert and breathing rapidly.

I get a piece of hamburger and hold it under her nose. I lure her off the bed and down the hall to the kitchen where I encourage her to eat the white rice and ground beef I cooked for her, Stella’s last supper.   I watch her as she sniffs, eats a few bites, then stares at the kitchen door contemplating the effort required to go outside and pee.

“Can you walk?”

I ask it loudly, sweetly and sincerely and I don’t care who hears me. Hugh, private in his grief, staring at his computer, concerned about me.   Will he try and fix it if he hears?   And the neighbors next door who once yelled at Stella for barking. They will know. They will know she is weak now. They will know I’m not that smart-ass who yelled back, and how I’m about to be hurt. I don’t care. I don’t care who knows how much I love and how much this love will cost me. I am bold in my devotion, steadfast in my vulnerability.

“Can you walk?”

I know the answer but I ask anyway.   I ask to affirm my willingness. I will do whatever it takes to keep Stella comfortable. I will be beside her no matter what. I am ready to love her completely, her failing body and undying heart.

“Can you walk?”

When my mother was dying, I didn’t ask that question. I didn’t ask any question. I didn’t want to know the answer because the answer would change everything. We didn’t talk about the cancer – how it was devouring my mother’s bones and internal organs, how it was planning to steal my favorite person.   We didn’t talk about love and loss, or her longing to see me find a life that would blossom.   We didn’t mention how death would assassinate that joy for her or how death would rob me of the pleasure of coming home from college for Thanksgiving break and seeing her face at the kitchen window, eager to hear every detail of my life.   Death would kill that. So we didn’t talk about it.

I was immobilized. Together in our once safe home in Briarcliff that last morning my mother couldn’t speak. She wanted something from me. She wanted my help. I was seventeen and I didn’t know what to do.   Something bad was in the room. I was too scared to show my fear. I wanted to fix it. I didn’t know what to do.

So I held her hand, tears without sobs pouring down my cheeks, bewildered in the face of unspeakable death. She looked at me and said “Thank you.” Thirty-six hours later, she died. Those were the last words she ever said to me.

“Can you walk?”

Somehow, through the years of living, ministry, dying loved ones, lost pets and lost loves, I’m learning to ask “Can you walk?” I’m learning to ask the other hard questions and be still and present with the answers.   I am learning how to suffer.

I took my first cautious steps toward suffering in Shadowlands, the Broadway production where by fluke and connections, I was cast as an understudy for eight weeks. The play is about C.S. Lewis’s transition from intellect to experience. When Lewis was a child, his mother died. He never cried, never allowed himself to feel the loss.   Late in life, when Lewis was a crusty bachelor professor, he met his true love Joy Gresham. Shortly after they met and married she got cancer and died.   When Joy died, he allowed the devastation to overtake him.

He said, “The boy chose safety, the man chooses suffering.” (Shadowlands).

Eight shows a week, sitting backstage listening to the monitors, I hear those words: The boy chose safety, the man chooses suffering.

And now, every day, I make the choice between safety and suffering. Will I have the courage to face what happens and keep my heart in the room?

Because I don’t know if I can walk. I don’t know if I can stand. There are days I stagger about this stage called earth, confronted with the sorrows of being human – the loss, the death, the indignity of perpetual change.

And there’s the infernal, internal drama. There is so much I want to do with my life, so many dreams I want to accomplish. I yearn for the bold person I hope to be.   But I am afraid to suffer the risk of trying. I want to hide under our rusty wheelbarrow and suffocate my hope. So I choose safety, turning to tasks and television, an epic to-do list of mundane activities and a stream of Orange is the New Black. There I remain safe in a women’s prison, mired in other people’s problems, hypnotized by girl-on-girl sex and two dimensional living, a flat screen for a flat existence.   I dare not suffer the scandal of boldness, the audacity of showing up in all my flaws and wonder.

But sometimes suffering is not suffering…

Those last days with Stella, I would gladly suffer again.   It was an honor to hold her as she let go. It was a joy to put her needs first. It was a joy to ask, “Can you walk?” and be in love with whatever was true.   It was joy to cherish her, to understand that love is love and it doesn’t matter if she’s just a dog, and that death can never kill a love like that. Suffering is not suffering. Suffering is the new joy.

Yes. Stella’s journey will become a touchstone for the days when I’m suffering from uncertainty, mediocrity or doubt, when I think I can’t walk, when I’m paralyzed with the anxiety of transitions, when it feels like trying to be present costs too much.

“Can you walk, sweetheart?” I will ask myself.

Somehow, through this inquiry, somehow I will get a glimpse of what it would be like to fall in love completely; to delight in my abilities and inabilities; to bless life’s strengths and frailties as part of the crazy-quilt of Existence.   Somehow, through one slow question at a time, I will arrive at an instant destination where I welcome all living and dying. Here I find that not only can I walk; I can fall – fall in love with a foreign homeland, where I am held as tenderly as a mother, a dog, or a beloved friend.

 

Reblogged from her blog

The revenge of the moths

(100 word flash fiction)

“Come on, we’ve come this far, let’s not falter. We’ve got to find our friend.”

“But, as far as we have found out, these strange arched eating places, they only serve cow, pig, fish and fowl. We won’t find him here.”

“A ‘lil bird told me this one’s different. They serve wildlife meat to only some people. We’ve got to get in and find out.”

“But, what are we going to do if we find they serve wild lion meat?”

“We will poison their food, so that no one eats here anymore. And do the same to all the others.”

~~~

Cecil’s death still haunts me. I need catharsis, I guess.

A bitter tale written for the lovely Rochelle’s Friday Fictioneers for the photo prompt below –

Photo © Madison Woods

Too young to wed – 2

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After I had written Too young to wed and was agonising about all the child brides and how helpless I felt, it occurred to me that there was another side to the story – the husband’s side. I had to write another story just to look at things from his side too. I confess, I couldn’t see very clearly (being female and not being from that culture).

THE SAVOUR

(110 word flash fiction)

Khalid flops to his side. Lovemaking with Saida is always dissatisfying. Firstly, she doesn’t move. Then, she is so small. Guilt stabs at his heart. He shouldn’t have married someone so young.

But, her uncle had begged until he had relented. After all, he was saving her from possible rape and ruin. He had given her a ‘married woman‘ status. And now, the chance to be a mother.

Smug satisfaction wipes away the guilt. Saida gets up and leaves. ‘Ungrateful wretch! Crying all the time.’

Sleep clouds his brain as clouds obscure the moon just as the thought is forming that his child and wife could both go to school.

~~~

My second story for this week’s Friday Fictioneers

PHOTO PROMPT -© Madison Woods

Too young to wed

(100 word flash fiction)

Saida’s husband has flopped to his side after heaving his 54-year old heavy, sweaty body on her 14-year one. Through her tears, she can see the moon outside the window emerge from behind clouds.

Fat-belly moon. Like her own growing belly. Wanderer of the skies. It reminds her of freedom. Of her short-lived school days.  Of her once fiery desire to be a teacher.

Yes! Fire could be her deliverer.

She tiptoes across the room to the kitchen. Thick, dark clouds are rapidly obscuring the moon. In the fading light, she finds the kerosene, douses herself and lights a match.

~~~

Can’t say I wrote this story. I only paraphrased a real-life story (or bits from lots of them). Watch the full feature on this National Geographic Live feature called ‘Too young to Wed” by Photographer Stephanie Sinclair and writer Cynthia Gorney. Heart-breaking stuff!

As always, writing for the lovely Rochelle’s photo prompt and joining in the Friday Fictioneers party is a pleasure.

PHOTO PROMPT -© Madison Woods

Like a pebble

 

Autumn drops a leaf

on sky-coloured still water

gold seeps into blue

 

blue seeps into me. I am

cloudless, skyless, limitless

~~~

 

Written for the Carpe Diem prompt – Like a pebble