Saturday, October 28, 2017

Fall Sestina

I rarely write poetry. Yet today I thought I'd try my hand at the sestina form.  I'm sitting in my living room, my hands so cold with the chill of the house in fall.  Outside, I see the leaves with the suggestion of color on their edges.  Perhaps I too have the suggestion of color on my fingertips.

Fall Sestina

As I watch the leaves
Falling, falling
Upon the mossy earth.
I consider the chill
And wonder if it's life
Sharper and hard.

I touch the ground, so hard
Under the layer of leaves
Now resting from life
And the thrill of falling.
My body seizes with chill
As I stare at the earth.

My fingers dig into earth,
Thrusting through the hard
Surface, the chill
Now forgotten, blown with the leaves
No longer falling
But surging with life.

I consider this, my life,
As my fingers force aside the earth.
My soul is falling, falling,
And the task is growing too hard.
I'm surrounded now by the leaves,
Overcome as I fight the chill.

My soul grows cold with chill,
But I fight for signs of life
Even as the autumn leaves
Continuously crowd the earth,
My frozen fingers now hard,
And I feel myself frozen, falling.

The rain now falling,
Compounding the chill,
My face cold, on the ground hard,
Too hard, to allow new life.
I consider my breath, the earth,
the peaceful corruption of leaves

No longer falling. I lie on the earth
And the leaves stifle the chill
As my hard heart now thaws for life.

Thursday, October 19, 2017

Chest Pains

Last weekend I traveled with a friend home to the country fair in Georgia.  I come from one of the most beautiful regions of the country, the Georgia mountains and foothills, and the land did not disappoint.  Not only was the drive beautiful, but Jennie and I took a walk around the family farm on Sunday morning, on trail and off, and I marvelled as I always do at the beauty of untouched nature.

We visited the Chickamauga Battlefield and discovered there is actually a tunnel in a hill in Tunnel Hill, Georgia.

I got to visit with my grandmother, and she treated us to a breakfast of biscuits and pecan praline butter.

It was a weekend full of inspiration.

There's something about going back there that helps me remember my passion for writing and that aids me in conceiving a new project.

Perhaps it's the quiet, slow pace of life.

Perhaps it's being in creation.

Perhaps it's being away from the push and pull of my life in South Carolina.

At the country fair there is much food, clogging, music, and crafts, and it's requisite that one stroll with ease amongst the tents and booths.  Toward the end of the day a photograph outside a local photographer's tent caught my eye.  At first, all I saw were beautiful purple rings that faded from dark to light, from deep purple to lavender.  I wandered over to find that it was in fact a photograph of onions.  Beautiful onions.  They looked like jellyfish. They called me within.

Just inside the tent my eye was struck by a black and white photograph of a gnarled tree silhouetted against the sky.  And the feeling began.

The feeling of a new project is a little bit like a punch in the chest, but it begins deeper within me.  It's a voice that starts to whisper deep in my belly; I can feel it swirling around before the idea reaches my mind.

I turned inside the tent and saw a black and white photograph of a window with the words, "God never closes a door without opening a..." painted above.  The window was distorted as was the dark, featureless reflection of a man within it. He looked as if he were wearing a preacher hat, and below the reflection, the shadow of his open hand was reaching up from the bottom of the wooden house.

There was a tightness in my chest.

As I searched for a smaller print of this photograph, I flipped to a color photograph of a dilapidated house with a rotting portico and a dead tree in front of it.  Two bright blue flowerpots stood outside the front gate as if they'd been banished.

The tightness almost took my breath away.

And just like that, it was there in my mind.

The story, the characters, the setting, the meaning, the feeling.

I felt the tug of my new manuscript.

Once again I became the vessel.  I didn't create this story or its characters.  They were born within me.

I'm ready to help them manifest.  I'm ready, at last, to write.