The following is a piece I wrote in response to this Magpie Tales #21 visual prompt. More responses can be found here.
fabric, paper, twigs, and twine
in fullest moon this spell will bind
shape your fullest heart’s desire
free its truth in earth and fire
The following is a piece I wrote in response to this Magpie Tales #19 visual prompt. More responses can be found here.
Sometimes the softest silk,
the smoothest grain,
hide danger, sharp,
compelling beyond trust.
Beware of costly knives
riddled with history.
The following is a piece I wrote in response to this Magpie Tales #18 visual prompt. More responses can be found here.
We called him Uncle Albert before he was the king. He was a sweet, shy man, you know. Stuttered a bit in stressful circumstances and always deferred to his more dashing brother, who was supposed to be king but gave it all up for love.
I remember sitting at a corner table with the rest of the kids in the family during his coronation celebration. It was quite an pompous affair, and poor Uncle Albert looked so uncomfortable. I thought he was going to vomit right then and there. No one paid much attention to us kids, so I swiped one of the commemorative pottery pieces from our table just to see if I could get away with it.
It’s been in the family since, and my granddaughter has it now. Keeps sharpened pencils in it.
She asked once if my Uncle Albert was the one the Beatles sang about. I think my Uncle Albert would would get a big kick out of that. And the pencil holder, too.
I’m a writer. I’m a writer. That’s what I am. I’m also a cutter and sewer and looper. I want to do it all. I’ve always wanted to do it all.
So I’m writing. Mapgie Tales for one (a new one in the works). Entered an essay contest about death for another.
Pinned on my wall are pieces of what eventually will be a wall hanging for an online craft exhibit.
Maybe it’s because I started in therapy again, and that always gets my juices going.
Or maybe it’s because I’m cutting down on my anti-depressant.
Or maybe I’m getting manic in my old age.
Or maybe I’m avoiding thinking too much about the awful state my mother is in.
Or maybe all of the above.
So much to create. So little time.
The following is a piece I wrote in response to this Magpie Tales #17 visual prompt of a female head. Go here to find other writers’ responses.
She was my sister before she was Lot’s wife – Irit, my older sister, who was special to the goddess, although that was a fact only known to the women of Soddom. For it was the men who ruled our town, our lives, our destiny, burrowing into the soils along the edges of the town, along the shores of the salty Dead Sea, bringing up the dark thick substance that held together our walls and our dead. “Mumiya” it was called. You call it “asphalt.” Sometimes a man would fall into a firey pit and drown in it. He would become mummified – forever preserved in a column of stone.
Irit was a good wife, and Lot was one of the better husbands, although that is not saying much, given the place that the new god of men designated for women. That is why many of us kept to the old ways in secret, gathering over our shared cauldrons of stew, rich with the yieldings of the fertile lands we also shared beyond the smokey shoreline. We would give our thanks to the Mother of All, ask for her blessings and prophecies, look to her priestess for guidance.
And that is how Irit came to be caught in the fires finally sparked by the greed of some of our men. She had a vision, Irit did – a vision of the earth quaking and burning, a vision of a darkness billowing out from the underworld. And she told her husband, who was one of the better husbands, who respected the wisdom of women and their ways, and often took his wife’s counsel. But when Lot tried to warn his fellow townsmen to watch for signs, they would not listen, for it was not their god who spoke, and they coveted their riches.
And so when the earth began to tremble and red fires erupted along the shoreline, when the land began to melt and fold in on itself and stony shards shot up into the air, Lot and and his wife, Irit, gathered their family and began to flee north to the olive groves — until Irit heard the screams of a townswoman whose husband held her down on the ground so that she could not run. And so Lot’s wife turned to help her friend.
“No!” I cried to my sister. “No!” cried Lot to his wife.
“No!” cried Lot’s wife as a great dark wave erupted from the earth, engulfing her and leaving her hardened form to withstand the next rain of sulphur-spewn stones.
And that’s when her head broke off and rolled toward me down the slope, landing with her face looking into mine and still calling “No!”
I carried her hardened image with me through all of our long journeys north to the land of Hatti, where I finally settled with a band of women who called themselves “ha-mazan.”
We kept the mummified head of Lot’s wife, Irit, on the altar where we sought the guidance of the Great Mother, whom we all knew by different names – Ishtar, Astarte, Innana, Lilitu — to remind us of Irit’s last word.
I don’t know what happened to Lot and his children. But I do know that what everyone thinks happened in Soddom is not the story I know about Lot’s wife.
[writer’s note: details about Bronze Age towns along the Dead Sea gotten from here.]
The book, which contains free verse and reprints of prayers and bits of prose, features lots of Corita’s collage art, which contains lots of cut-up words from ads and headlines, sometimes reconfigured, sometimes not.
The description above is from a post on the site from which I won the book — Killing the Buddha. It’s a site that I find always stimulating.
I never win anything. I mean it. I think that this is the first thing I every won. Well, I came in second in a Swing Dance contest once. Even got a trophy. Usually I don’t even make an effort to enter any kind of contest. Never play the lottery. Because I never win anything.
But this time I did. And I did because I remember the 60s. I didn’t remember Sister Corita, who created the book, published in 1967. But I did remember the Berrigan Brothers, and I remembered that Daniel Berrigan was a Jesuit.
I recently read online somewhere (can’t find it again) that the story was that Daniel Berrigan kept a photo of Sister Corita in his shower with a note that said “no one should shower alone.”
Thinking of Berrigan, I am remembering another activist ex-priest who was a good friend at one point in my life. He has grown immensely as an artist in those past 25 years, although he was good even back then. His paintings, as he is, are larger than life. I just love his new stuff.
I have been fortunate in my life to have had some closeness with some truly unique men, who have inspired me and moved on and left me with the kinds of memories that will keep me smiling someday as I retire to a rocking chair in the sun.
(And I’ve been just as fortunate to continue to have a group of close women friends whose constancy and candor, humor and heart, help to keep me smiling — well, most of the time.)
So, now I wait for my prize, a book by a creative woman, to arrive.
It’s a good day.
Yes, I know that’s the name of a book by the Ya-Ya writer, Rebecca Wells.
But in this case, I’m referring to this slide show of “altars” that people submitted to a request for “What’s on Your Shelf” from the blog on Killing the Buddha.
I’m not sure how I found that site — probably just surfing around, looking for something to think about, care about. Not that there isn’t plenty out there: homeless, bankruptcy, greed, war, fraud, despair. Oh, yes, plenty to think about and care about. Too much, as a matter of fact. Too much for my tired brain, tired heart.
If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him is one of my favorite non-fiction books. Maybe by only favorite non-fiction book. So, it’s not surprising that when I ran across the Killing the Buddha website, I was intrigued.
I used to have an altar of sorts — that’s when I had room for a surface to put it on. Now I have a wall
that includes a witch’s broom, my old power stick, a quilted shield especially designed and constructed for me by my good quilter friend, my new walking stick, Acuaba, and a photoshopped picture of “witches at tea” using the faces of my women friends. As powerful and meaningful as any shelved altar, I would think.
My shelves themselves are stacked with books, craft patterns, and assorted other things of significance. For example:
You might notice the Tarot deck, the icons, the empty box from my 3G iphone, a mini cast iron cauldron. What you don’t see in the shelves below are my collections of beads and jewelry findings that I’m trying to find time to play with/work on.
As I hurry along to get ready for Christmas (yes, I do still call it Christmas; why not?), I think about the cocoon in which I have wrapped myself during this time of world wide insanity to escape from the fundamentalists, the radical atheists, the war mongers and warring sufferers, indeed, the sufferers of all kinds.
I surround myself with resident family and Bully Hill Seasons wine and Chocolate Mint kisses, with quilting dreams and knitting crafts, with escapist suspense novels on ipod and paper, with the snores of my old and much loved cat.
I wish there were, indeed, little altars everywhere like mine — eclectic and inclusive and affirming.
I wish there were an altar somewhere on which if could feel prayers for my suffering mother would be answered.
(the writing prompt was an acorn)
She is walking today — short stumbling steps — her chipped cane prodding the gravel choked weeds along the length of driveway.
We are walking today because she can, because it’s a mild early-fall morning, because the pains of her age are not so bad, because I am here to help her if she stumbles.
We walk along the property line, a slow unsteady march through light and shadow. The unkempt ground is littered with the leavings of the season — withered crabgrass and dandelion stalks, weathered leaves, and an early harvest of acorns.
I hold her free arm while she beats the ground with her cane, grunting angry words that I can’t understand.
A sharp white stone catches her attention, and she prods it with her toe, strikes it with her cane, sends it out of her limited sight.
She stops before a scattering of acorns, a barrier to her shuffling gait. Grunting, again, she swings the tip of her cane, stabbing at the offending shells, missing more than she hits, the cane tip knocking aside small stones and sending too few acorns rolling into the underbrush.
She is shaking now, from fear or frustration or just plain tiredness. I can’t tell.
I lead her back inside to her chair by the kitchen table, where a doughnut and coffee will take her mind off the recalcitrant acorns.
She will forget her battle with the acorns in the driveway.
But I can’t.
(the prompt was a memory of a piece a jewelry)
How sweet it is to be sixteen. At least it’s supposed to be. I know that I am not nearly as sweet as my parents want the world to think I am.
So they give ma a heart. A 24 carat solid gold heart, heavy with considerations.
A prominent diamond chip marks the day of my birth on the calendar etched into the center of the heart’s face, and lines like rays of the sun streak from the edges of the month of March to the edges of the shiny heart.
I am sweet sixteen, and my wrist is shackled with a heavy heart on a heavy gold charm bracelet. Look, Look, the clanking metal announces: Look how much my parents love me.
Having strayed so far from my poetic roots, I am taking a brief writing workshop based on the Amherst Writers and Artists Method. Blogging has given me plenty of practice with the first person essay; but it’s poetry where my heart is. I need some help getting my brain to follow.
The writing “prompt” for the exercise was the word “breathe.”
She does not swim –
afraid to breathe against
the weight of water, afraid
of those breathless wet depths.
But she goes to a sweat lodge
where steamy smoke rises —
thick breath steadily blinding
a clear winter sky.
She lets herself be led into the wet
dark already slick with steam
and sweat, cool water hissing,
smoking stones.
Thoughtless with dread
she stumbles out into the cold,
blinded by water and smoke
and a clutch of fear that sends
breath into memory:
— a child’s cry for breath stunted by fever
lungs rattling beneath a tent of steam
thick as smoke, heavy as a depth of sea.
Well, its a start.
I was tooling around the website of the campus of which I am an alumna because I will be going with a college friend to his 50th reunion next month. As I was looking through the list of events for the reunion weekend, I noticed that the college library was having an event for former staff of the college’s newspaper to celebrate the fact that the old paper copies of the publication have been digitized.
Wow, I think. I must be in those digits somewhere, having been the Feature Editor and having authored several different columns over my coed years.
So I go into the data base and poke around the issues from time period that I was on the paper’s staff.
It’s a whole lot embarrassing to read what I wrote as a college junior that pretty much always appeared on page 3. I pretentiously called my column “The Prism.”
Well, at least this isn’t so bad.
We didn’t have a journalism program back then, and I cringe at what today’s journalism students would think if they had some reason to read what I wrote when I was young and full of myself and still trying out my voice.
The writers’ workshop I joined starts in a couple of weeks.
Funny, but back then I probably didn’t think I needed to take one.