Untitled requiem for E -

I remember when you wove beauty from the sky in purple hues and bands of green and gold A woman of passion and fire, who painted the Sangres, who drank deeply from mountain streams. I long to see you take up your brushes and your loom once again, old friend. The West has become a faded memory behind your eyes. Banked fires hold the heat of youth, of memory and desire… You live now among green hills and fields unbroken by time Driftless in a cocoon of memory; mute, with tales untold.

I write -

This week's prompt was "I write," prompting musings on process, on why we write - reminds me of the Shaker hymn "I Sing Because I'm Happy," or at least that's the title I like. So the following was the result of that - writing is a solitary pursuit, and the irony is that the group has motivated us all to write more, to write better, to write as a social pursuit - even in these anti-social times. I write sporadically, sometimes reluctantly, in the spaces between mundane chores and restlessness, fueled by wine and a stubborn resistance to anything that I should be doing. I find the computer more satisfying that my old typewriter and rarely write by hand – do we now key instead of type? I can’t keep up… But I digress. Publication – I wrote a monthly newspaper column of a nostalgic bent a few years ago promoting a year-long celebration of my hometown’s sesquicentennial, and subsequently wrote and edited a history book – you find that many folk have a storytelling talent – raconteurs who are modest about their diaries and recount charming family histories, whispers of the past in sepia and sentiment. Self-publication was less satisfying in some ways. My son and I put together a small volume of poetry with selected drawings and photos…I felt self conscious about the enterprise. An old-fashioned sort of modesty regarding blowing one’s own horn, I suppose… I used to blog, selected an arcane term for the title of the blog and no one read it, of course. It’s still out there – Zwischeraum – it means a space between the wall and an outer wall, originally an architectural term – I have no idea where I found this word. And I altered the spelling. I know that my writing buddies will look up this word and find that it should be Zwischenraum The blog can still be found at http://cosmicalice.blogspot.com/ and this group may spur me to resurrect it. I miss writing during my dry spells, but don’t do it anyway, some perversity that causes me to rebel against myself. NaNoWriMo got me started on longer pieces: besides “Strays,” I have two nascent novels: “Lead Astray”, a struggling murder mystery that won’t take shape, and a memoir of my marriage entitled “The Sky in August,” a recounting for my children, who didn’t get a chance to know their father as I knew him. “Lead Astray” involves a lead mine, thus the spelling. Shameless punning. There you have it, my friends. And I do consider you valued friends.

Another Fall Writing Prompt

two years later, and ...tah dah! another writing prompt on Fall.  This one elicited a poem that I'm honing:

Evensong graces the autumn night

tree frogs and locusts pulse, slowly now

as the Harvest Moon rises over the

eastern hillside, full of itself.

Cornstalks whisper their dry secrets as owls

whooo-hoo across the river bottom.

The breeze carries news of the fall, the aroma

of decaying leaves permeates

the night.  Great cottonwoods drop

softly their golden attire

onto the

patient

earth.