There is a Path

There is a path

So many have taken to it

It becomes trodden

Wayside ground

Where nothing can grow

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dVerse prompt on describing an emotion without saying what it is

Fire

Led into the desert by the Spirit

Forty days

It was the Word that brought Him out

On fire for the Kingdom

And able to speak

Against the Pharisees of His day

He knew who He was

And ran knowingly

Into the burning sand

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dVerse prompt on the word “burn” in quadrille with thoughts of Aaron Joel Mitchell, age 41, who ran into the effigy of the burning man at Burning Man 2017.

Great Blue Heron

They call you blue.  I say you are rather gray.  The mood you put me in when standing at the edge of the pond to fish out the koi.  Brilliant orange harpooned on the beak.  They say a koi can live for fifty years.

Now I watch heron on the beach, the silly legs straggling along the sand, or the patient one roosting in the tree over the lagoon.  There is a white heron on the lake today. Hard to forget the gray.

predator and prey

leave mark on gray windy sky

beauty in color
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the oldest known koi was Hanako, who lived for 226 years

dVerse prompt for haibun in gray
  

Letterpress

My goal this summer is to do a chapbook of a hiking trip to Cathedral Park in Canada.  I will be doing it in letterpress so brevity will be of great concern.  It will be about twelve pages on quality paper, hand sewn binding and a mix of haiku and other short forms.  Not sure of the print types that will be available to me yet.  Frank at dVerse has asked us to consider brevity so I am starting my project.  Each poem would be on its own page.

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top of Stone City

glacier carved granite garden

alpine fir and larch

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white cloud

castes shadow below

on mountain lake

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distant mountains

stretch 

across horizon

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kwash kwash kwash

my steps grind the stones

of Stone City

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Look At Moses

didn’t give up

wrote it down

knew the stories

saw the hedge on fire

threw the tablets

after laboring

to carve the stone

without an eloquent voice

brought the law

to those he led

through the sea

his wilderness experience

beginning with a murmur

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dVerse quadrille prompt on murmur

White Pelican

The first white pelican I saw was in Florida.  My husband and I were driving past a pond and there it was resting on the water.  I shout white pelican, white pelican.  (We were sometimes birders.). Go around the block.  He won’t do it.  He keeps going.  There is only so much pain I can wear on my face.  I kept it there for days.

Now in Texas he says – did I tell you there were white pelicans on the lake yesterday?  White pelican, white pelican.  We walk to the lake seeing them from a distance.  We keep walking to the shore and there they are, about a hundred more.

find white pelican

migration flight in winter

wipes the pain away

Tautology

I am who I am

I am who I am not

It is what it is

It is what it is not
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Prompted by Grace Black on acceptance and the use of repetition 

Change

I change my mind all the time. I say I am going to do one thing and then I do another. I change my mind.  Bees make a beeline.  I am not like that.  I am like the flight pattern of birds caught up in a wind.
 

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There were about a hundred white pelicans on the lake yesterday. Before then I had only seen one in my life. Change is the dVerse prompt. This was change on a number of levels.

Soup

I am feeling faint, can’t think, need to eat. All my “I ams” served in a bowl, spiced up in my self-made stew of projects, people and poetry. Alter the ingredients. Instead of a cup of procrastination, I will use a heaping cup of new vision in appreciation of who I am.  Drink it up.

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prompt from 28 Days of Self-Love by Grace Black

Hometown Building

The library, church, elementary and junior high school were buildings significant to my childhood.  Their appearances would suggest that they were built around the same era with bricks from the same brickyard perhaps by the same bricklayers.  I never knew their history only their halls and rooms.

A tornado destroyed the schools.  The old library has been purchased for an upscale living space.  The church still has service once a week by a visiting pastor who says God is good.  The organist plays but there is no choir.  High on the steeple, bells still ring out the time and a tune.

oh what memories

built from debris of the past

rip through the springtime

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dVerse prompt to write a haibun on your hometown