that's mrs. mediocrity to you

I stand on these acres of history, long fallow fields of tears forgotten and brittle reminders of years blown by, remembering how once we grew green shoots of conflict and the next spring plowed them under, making food for the forest of memory we drive through with broken blade, always turning earth, always searching for what we’ve buried. But the worm always works alone, adding air and rich casting to this hard-baked, clay-caked soil, choked with rock and seed and ancient bone. This is my home,  this place where dinner is served at noon and the sky is always hungry. I pose on one foot in the shade of a tree that neither of us ever mentions, a scarecrow of deliverance for the red cardinal who lands on my shoulder and feeds me the coldest hour. Our nests have become identical, and you laugh as you toss broken frame and bent missive in a fit of tidy redemption. There are no berries here, no reward for existing. There is only wind and the silence of everything, whistle warning us through each night.

my skin crackles with
growth and tick tocking question
unanswered roots entwine

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Joining in over at dVersePoets for Haibun Monday.

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Prepared to run, poised for flight, yet standing my ground. The sky grows dark with words that flit by with the silence of bats, words used, expelled, offered in place of all I cannot give. The earth rumbles with those I’ve yet to speak.

I want to remember tomorrow before it happens and dream of yesterday’s chance. I want to be the bird that lands last. I want to sing with the abandon of loss.

Instead, I reach my arms high and offer sanctuary, spreading branches like wings and roots like scrabbling claw feet. I am sharp-edged and hollow-toed. I am filled with echoes.

I dreamt of you again last night, fooled myself into seeing you again, but even my dream felt the need to remind me that you are gone. And even in sleep I wondered if this is the way it will always be, and I spent the rest of the night wandering lost from room to room in a house built from memories of places I’ve never been.

We were there, together, just for a moment. Before I remembered.

Mostly, I’ve come to understand that the questions will never be answered. Mostly, I’ve come to embrace the lack of knowing. I am content to wander through this field of grass and bird and flailing branch. The wind is a challenge to stay upright, my map has sailed high into clouds of disdain.

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And we laughed again
at free falling bottles and
broken stars. We laughed.

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Joining in today over at dVersePoets with a Haibun, using Kahlil Gibran’s quote: “Yesterday is but today’s memory, and tomorrow is today’s dream.” as inspiration.

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and it’s always accidental, the discovery of light and hope and love in the midst of deep shadow. we want to be cooler than that, less trite, or at the very least, sharp-edged and angled, dressed in hard shells that cover our scars. we think that’s how to stay safe, how to survive, how to win. we think there’s an answer, when all the food is in the questions, hanging low and heavy with overripe nectar. if we’re lucky, one of them will drop just as we walk by, leaving splatters of wisdom on our long black cave of coat, and for a moment we’ll remember what it’s like to be alive (or at least we’ll forget what it’s like to be less than). the bloom is the destination and the growing is the map. have you ever seen what a tangle of thorn the rose tumbles from?

eventually it all falls down, rotten with seed and ancient mirror.

you must look
for the glimmer
of valor

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Overhead, a flock of tree swallows circled like vultures. She wasn’t sure why, or where they’d come from, but the sight of them stopped her in her tracks and she stood there, face upturned, mouth open, watching quietly for several minutes. Remembering how to fly. The air hung heavy on her skin with the weight of long-discarded clothing, and she swam through each breath with the slight panic of not enough rising up in her throat. Sweat ran down her back in sheets, and leaves pasted themselves to her skin in a rorschach of camouflage. She wasn’t lost, or floundering, she’d simply decided to marry the landscape. But the forest had a way of closing in on her even as the sky made her taller, and she had to keep moving lest her feet take root.

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she wandered the floor
in search of midnight feathers
fingers clutching blue

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Linking in over at dVersePoets with a haibun for Haibun Monday.