#11 Read Write Image . . . Reflections

No winter bites as cold as this.
You’ve hidden your face
behind a mirror. I remember each line,
the mole, the crease on your forehead,
Behind you I see leafless trees
like lacey fingerprints atop the snow,
and snow falls everywhere.

All I want is to see your face, still hidden,
your hands curled like two lost dark geese,
the mirror a perfect oval, mysterious, unknowable.
The hills stretch out endlessly behind you.

Someone who loves you knit those gloves
and tied the belt on your coat, long ago.
Yet you stand before me, fixed, invisible.
Maybe I see myself in your mirror,
a nameless tree against a cold and foggy sky.
I’m wondering just when winter will end.


This week's prompt from Read Write Image #11 uses this evocative photograph, "Reflections" taken by Camile Tulcan, shared thru Creative Commons. Although I do try to write in response to ReadWritePoem, this time the poem "Reflecta" by Gordon Mason led me to this prompt.

#151 Would you trust . . .

Would you trust a jubilado
dancing in the street?
See omens in a cloud of green butterflies
settling just ahead of your path?
Stare into the red heart
of a Rose of Sharon.
Touch the points on a nettle?
Bathe your face
in the mist of a waterfall?
Look into the eyes of a stray dog
that follows you?
Count the fingers and toes
of a newborn babe?
Hear the telephone before it rings?
Dance without music?
Dream without sleeping?
Say yes before the question is asked?

This week’s Sunday Scribbling’s prompt is trust, a very difficult prompt. I wonder if we trust our ability to understand the reality that exists around us, that we perceive or define by our senses. Though I do not, or do not trust that I do, some of my relatives seem to have an extra sense. Also, jubilado is Spanish for retired person. As a relatively newly retired person, this word fascinates me for its very different connotations.

Some people have asked when Standing Stones will be finished. I do work every day except travel days, and now am revising Section 3 (out of five sections), focusing mostly on plot holes, logical connectors, and character development. I’d like these characters and their predicaments to be as real to a reader as they are to me. I hope to have one more go through for style and estimate I’ll be ready for my 3 readers by June or July, if all goes well. Six weeks in September/October brings the last bit of research and editing, so I hope to finish completely by December 2010, making it about three years overall for this novel. After that, the story’s no longer mine. Wish me well.

#150 Soccer . . .

There’s nae sport in it
if ye canna’ play the game, twist
yer head down, scrub the dirt
off yer leg, and curse
and hope and flail after the ball,
down the grassy field and back,
and hate the other side
‘till the whistle calls done.

There’s just that moment,
an ye don’t know it then,
when the ball sails past,
an yer boot taps it so
it flies good and true.
They look at you different then;
all the rest is remembering.


Tall, skinny, clumsy, and wearing glasses that were too expensive to break, I was last called and played little in the streets when I was a kid. I never understood the thrill of sport until I met up with a group of women over 50 and played my heart out on the soccer field.

#149 Morning poem . . .

Chip-chip-chip the beja flor
calls: Awake. Awake.
It is the last day in Ouro Preto, this valley
of nameless trees and red tiled roofs
brightening in the morning sun.
Trucks lumber up cobblestoned streets where
last night orixas and students danced
in samba, lace, bead, and drum, joyous.
So many have slept
anonymously, abandoned,
to waken here, in your room, Pablo Neruda,
whose lines make me want to sing.

The morning does begin here in Ouro Preto with hummingbirds, and last night students did dance in the streets, practicing for Brazil’s famous Carnival. This week’s prompt from Sunday Scribblings is simply art. For every person who takes pen or brush, and dedicates time, talent and effort to express some interpretation, past the senses and rhythm of pure line and color, to heighten our awareness of the meaning of life, I wish another someone who looks deep and says: Ah. Yes.