The Ladybug

A lady bug sits
Atop a lone blade of grass
At one with the world

Fitting perfectly.
I watch gazing intently
Searching for my place,

A place all my own
Where others may stare at me
Lost in awe and thought.

Early Spring Haiku

Close, but no cigar! Here is my mirror-metaphor and it looks like I was combing the clouds and not the wind after all. Interesting, the two metaphors, anyway. Here it is . . . with a few of it's friends of similar subject.

Leaves not yet opened
Trees thin fingers comb the sky
Carding April clouds


In a shock of spring
Yellow forsythia blaze
Bright against the snow


Grey April branches
Strung with drops of diamond rain
Bare with dreams of green


©Edwina Peterson Cross

Prelude

The wind howls and combs
the dead tangles from the trees.
They fall and splinter with
a kind of certainty.
Expectation and collapse.
Fall and transformation.
The root remains.
The sycamores groan and sigh.
A high pitched squeal sings
out from the ash and maple.
The prelude to the green composition
of leaves.
This leave taking is a harmony
that writes itself.

Malarial

Fever
Shivering
Temperature rising
Headaches
Hypotension
Jaundice

Two drops of blood spread on the microscope
Stained and examined
Detect the
Falciparum parasite carrying Anopheles mosquito
Confirm a
Malignant malaria affecting the brain
And nervous system

The resistant parasite is in the blood
Symptoms appear, disappear, come and go in phases
No known anti-malarial products
No quinine, doxycycline, mefloquine
Is tolerated
Will combat
The parasite that daily demands I write

Hymn to the Sun

I have just added this poem, by William Michaelian, to his collection at Soul Food.

After the war,
fathers are silent in their vineyard rows,
and mothers are bound by grief.

After the war,
sisters tend the rolling hills
where brothers forever sleep.

And the young brides who wait
go mad suckling their unborn children.

After the war,
the earth sings a hymn to the sun,
but nothing grows, hidden from the light.

What will we say, after the war?
What strange stories will we tell?
When the children ask us why we killed,
will we send them on to hell?

The earth sings a hymn to the sun.
Like fallen angels, we walk among the graves.
Here lies the artist, the builder, the dreamer,
she would be a doctor, he a teacher,
yet none of them were saved.

After the war, will we hear the earth?
When the blood has turned to crusty loam,
will we look up in wonder at the sun?

After the war,
will we sing a hymn to living,
or will we choose to sleep?

Some say we are descendants of those who lived on Mars.
Some say benevolent beings from other worlds are here to guide us.
Some say God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh.
Some say He is old and tired, and has been resting ever since.

I say Yes. They are all part of the same golden hymn.
To deny is an imagined privilege, religiously abused,
an inherited excuse to remain pathetic and small.
Yes is an open door. No is a death knell in the dark.

Winnie

Roses are red
Violets are blue
You got me into the Poets Blog
The biggest of hugs from me to you!!!

Bobbi

The day folds

The day folds like paper
into afternoon,
then crumbles
into the ball of night.
On the windows
I can see my reflection
against the black glass,
like a ghost
floating outside the window.
Haunting myself.
I drift away.
My ghost backs into the darkness
and perhaps turns to mist
and rises to the treetops.
I sit and think
of the sun on my face
as I lie beneath
the music of a cottonwood.

The kingdom of flesh and shadow

You are a tangled forest
which calls out to the explorer,
the discoverer,
to lay claim to the slant
of sinuous light that falls
across you
from the open window,
to part the leaves and vines,
wet with morning,
nd enter the kingdom of flesh
and your blessed shadow
which closes.

March Afternoon Haiku

Mist of mountain rain
Caught in a shower of light
Sweep shines the Siskiyous

©Edwina Peterson Cross

Greetings, hello, bonjour, guten tag, cheerio...

Hi Winnie,

The blog finally let me in. Just a "hello" for the moment. I'll take a look at the posts and then get a poem or some spontaneous writing... one or the other... posted.

Off to read for now.

ruhdwulf (Mike)

Just a year ago - Within the Field of Rushes

A Reed Weaving

From the Coral Sea to New Caledonia
The other side of a world unknown
I wrapped my heart in a weaving of rushes
And set it there on the foam
Sail away, sweet child of my youth
Through the vast seas silver water
To be plucked from the tide and kissed into truth
By the Pharo’s clear eyed daughter


©Edwina Peterson Cross
March 10, 2004

Appraising the Heart

Recently a thought provoking email drifted into my box at Soul Food.

I am planning to get my house reappraised and I started to make of list of things I need to do. Clean up the yard, make it neat. Clean up the house, make it neat and sparkly
clean.

And I started to think on a more personal level. What if we had to get our soul and heart appraised? Kind of like spiritual checking in. What would show? Does my heart look like a closet overflowing, disorganized and full to burst? Are my emotional scars showing?

I went to an amazing Egyptian show in Sydney called the The Tomb of the Mummy. I was most moved by the last thing a soul goes through upon entering The Field of Rushes (the afterlife). They call it the weighing of the HEART. Is that just too romantic of me?

If someone came to appraise your heart…what would they see? What if you had a little warning to clean things up. Is there really anything you can do to prepare for that? Maybe not. Get your spirit in order. Focus on the things that count. And what counts for you?

Just some of my thoughts.

Blessings,
Luna

This was not the first time that the notion of weighing the heart had risen at Soul Food. Maybe it was the final challenge to appraise my heart that drew words from a poets heart that has long been encased in rock. Something in Luna's challenge broke the spell and I felt compelled to write.


Appraising the Heart

An eye for an eye
A tooth for a tooth

Within the field of rushes
Lies the heart of one
Mother, daughter, wife, sister, friend,
Whose time in this realm is done?

Within the field of rushes
Lies the heart of one
Teacher, counsellor, advocate, imagineer, friend
Who took but gave an eye, a tooth, a shoulder

Earth to Earth
Ashes to ashes dust to dust

Within the field of rushes
Lies a heart of one
Who gave more than she took
Who returns to the source

As light as a feather

Heather Blakey March 29 2005

ARTIST

I Believed

Artist


I did not believe in the painting
The dance, the words or the song
But I believed in the Painter
A belief that was solid and strong

I believed in the Dancer
Whose movement was fire to behold
I believed in the Singer
Whose song filled the darkness with gold

I believed in the Actor
Who could move souls with her voice
And I believed in the Woman
When she spoke of a different choice

The medium never has mattered
To one who draws light from above
Who makes radiant rainbows of magic
As a prism of passion and love

I believed in the Artist
With a faith strong as heaven can weave
This giving soul suntouched with genius
I believed.

I will always believe.



©Edwina Peterson Cross
(For April)

Will my voice be heard

Exhausted by the relentless, droning and grinding of industrial machines they lie
limply in the stomach, heavy, sagging, speechless.
Suspended in a fine web of rationalistic jargon they struggle,
wriggling, squirming within the cavity of the lung.
Amid the ink filled veins they endlessly compete for space with bulky platitudes, mission statements and withering traditional reason.
Bound by the parameters of productivity guidelines they block the bowels endless tubes, constipated by deadlines and long hours.
Slowly they rise and, with gritty determination, squeeze their way along the adrenaline squashed alongside hefty, rhetorical, motherhood statements.
Willfully they gather in the homelands of the heart forming a wheel, squeezing and pressing
until the throbbing exhausts the reason briefly freeing the passageways from rhetorical motherhood statements.
Triumphant, fresh perspective bursts forth like semen
Only to shrink and shrivel in the great cosmic void.
My internal voice must be heard, but,
Will these feisty words have the stamina and will to endure the futile battle with such weighty external forces?
Will it be heard tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow?

Word Army

Dear Live Poets
I am not renowned for my poetic skill and my fiction writing leaves much to be desired yet there is this word army within me, gathering in the wings. What am I to do?

Like light moonbeams they quietly gather,
creeping through the cast iron curtains.
Treading lightly, the whispered word patterns silently amass,
Stealthily emerging from within the lofty mansion of the gods.
The rebel army forms a vivid word picture.

Disciplined, they gather resolutely in the darkened,
labyrinthine corridors of the psyche,
forming sturdy battalions.
With banners raised, they prepare to march, ready to invade distant lands.
Graceful, curling, silky, smooth little words, skilfully dancing pirouettes,
performing acrobatic feats lead the way with agility.
While taut, tense, cryptic vipers,
having skilfully twisted themselves from within the invisible chains,
Hephaistos so meticulously fashioned in his anvil,
self-righteously form an indomitable rearguard.

United the word warriors stand erect, on the mountaintops, awaiting the bugle call.
In unison they surge forward, gathering momentum as they ride into the valleys.
The word army, united, buoying each other, singing, marches in tight formation.
In rhythm, the armed force gathers momentum,
vigorously occupying the foreign, virgin, white unblemished soil of the New World.

Live Poets at Soul Food

The Dead Poets Society met in a cave to read and share verse. This group is for poets who are very much alive, who have words running, pulsating through their veins, who capture words in word nets and spin them into golden banners.