Societal Ask

Can we acknowledge the richness of our resources:
that which sustains and endures? Always looking for the next shiny thing,
craving the exotic, the surprising… pushing purpose, movement… toward what? Telling ourselves we want lifelong commitment, and then moving on… emotions depleted. How do we define standards, intuit and reassemble a frame, counsel a collective, when expectations, creeping and woven into consciousness, resemble oppression? Hope -as sold by patriarchal mindsets, striving to mutilate common sense – is useless to revive when society teaches us to blindly follow the unintelligible…

Full moon a warning –
reverence for mystery
not conspiracy

Society’s light
waning on the back of lies-
hopelessness surreal

Hate is born from fear
disinformation a tool –
We are being played.

Step back! Cautions moon
observe under a new light –
reconnect with love.

(This poem, derived from a dream, started as a haibun – prose followed by a haiku – but the haiku multiplied. Guess we will call it a variation on a haibun. Image my own.)

Unpublished

Worms have invaded
every sliver of my antagonist
by now, and still I tarry …

Minute details excuses
for hesitation,
the memoir languishes
unpublished

Wanting my audience
to savour each morsel,
declare it fit for consumption

The ironic death march
of a solemn vow
to make light of dark.

(Art my own)

Shoreless

I attempt to predict
but the future is blank

Snapshots only portray
the past, fragmented

Sunsets might suggest,
birds leak probabilities

But I want to peek
behind the final curtain

Cut through the noise
of popular currents

Life is two-faced
deception paired

And row as I might
fighting the flow

Manna follows its own rhythm
nips at my fears, like a tail wind

Nothing in it but to breathe
Lighten this intense need to know

(Image my own)

Afraid To Fly

I chase dreams
never daring to rise
beyond the water line

keeping to the reeds
and shoreline of familiarity
afraid of being shot down

Afraid that dreams aren’t mine
to claim, that I am damned
doubled cursed as woman
and child of sin

I will fall often
drown in pools of stagnation
till one days these wings

A mind of their own
will lift me up
and catch those dreams.

(Afraid To Fly appeared here June 2019.
Art my own)

Dreaming Oceans

Ingrained in me
this flight
eye on the future
the periphery
closing in.

Husband urges me
forward, but where
this road leads
I do not know

Connected to self
open, escaping into
the vast expanse
becoming fluid
alive, nurtured

I have been spit out
by life so often,
taught to be taut,
it’s hard to plunge,
let go of the past
and just swim.

(Submitting for my weekly challenge: peripheral. Image my own.)