Crystal Caves

www.nationalgeographic.com

The crystal caves,

dreaming deep,

some of earth's 

most beautiful secrets

keep.

Feast your eyes

but take no prize.

For once,

no Possessing -

just

let beauty sleep.

posted for Hannah's Transforming Fridays prompt at Real Toads: the crystal caves of Mexico. I suppose it is a miracle they havent mined this treasure trove to extinction. Instead, there are scientists there, studying the caves. Maybe we are waking up. 

The Dogs of Winter

I will not move until I've had my coffee.

Go OUT??!! I just looked outside and there is No Way!

Fuggeddaboudit!

Seriously. I'll just hold it till spring.

Brrrrrr..........no way, no how.

My mom just shunts me out the door. 

It sucks to be me.

Good thing I have warm winter gear!

Hee hee. The expressive pug is my granddog, Chloe, Stephanie's youngest. Sporting the aviator hat is my Jasmine, newly shorn of her winter's nest of mats and clumps and looking a teeny bit smaller as a result. If I thought cutting my hair would do the same for me, I'd get right on it!

Ode to a Single Mom

hdwallpapersdesign.com

Susan has set us a prompt at Mid-Week Motif: honoring women's achievements. I considered many of the obvious heroic women, but then I thought about women for whom there is often a lot of judgment and blame, who quietly do the undoable without a lot of help or support, acknowledgment or thanks: the single moms of the world.

The last thing you wanted for your children

was a broken family and lives of grueling poverty.

The last thing you wanted for yourself

was raising kids alone,

working one or two jobs

to keep the roof from falling on their heads,

years when you felt you existed

only to carry bags of groceries in the door.

You were only one person, and at work,

not home to try to keep your kids

from making bad choices.

They rarely had the coolest clothes, any money,

enough to eat, the things they wanted,

or two parents in the home.

But!

There was enough love and laughter

to raise the rafters,

and you never ran away,

or sat in the bar drinking to numb the misery

of Never Being Enough.

You got up every morning, often singing,

to make the breakfast and the lunches,

and see them off to school. 

You did what was required

because it was your job to do.

And you may not hear it often,

in all the stories about 

deprived traumatic childhoods,

but, kiddo, you did a damned fine job.

Dancing the Paradigm

As the planets shift their orbits

in the heavens,

a time of change on earth arrives.

Thought:

what would happen if we 

expanded our perspective 

wide enough to change, 

not just a relationship,

a circumstance, a limitation,

but the entire paradigm -

if we breathed an evolution, a revolution,

an expansive flowering

of every good intention,

transforming them to action,

a New Way borning?

What would happen if we:

bought no plastic,

watched and participated in no violence,

ate no trauma from factory farms,

nurtured our children well,

believed - truly believed - in Joy?

recycled, reused, reduced,

rejected excess, embraced simplicity,

and loved ourselves and our neighbour?

Solstice wish:

May we trip the light fantastic,

prancing and cavorting

like giddy reindeer

under a waning polar moon,

conga into April sunshine with hopeful feathers

all aloft and glistening,

caper into the dawn, vibrant and smiling

and never so alive!

Come spring, I shall pull on the moss

like socks,

and tiptoe through the forest

like a sprite.

I will dip a tip-toe 

into the Pond of Peace,

and set my dreams alight

with the shine of sunset

beside the western sea.

Never before,

has there been

such a springtime of Possibility

as now I see.

Wild Woman On the Brain, Round 2

examiner.com

Wild Woman

temporarily

misplaces

her brain.

No worries,

there'll be

another one

along

in twenty minutes.

A re-run from 2011, kids......brain is in Recovery, being rehabbed!

The Invisible Expanding Woman

google image

It was imperceptible,

at first,

becoming invisible.

For almost fifty years,

I was a person in the world,

till suddenly eyes began to look 
past or through me

as if I were empty air.

As I gained weight of wisdom

and girth of body,

eyes fell away from me

as if afraid to light,
for fear age is contagious.
(psssst: it is!)

I was a book of Ponderous Truth

disguised, absurdly, as an Eggo waffle.

I poured on the syrup,

and made my peace.

*********

II.

With our cloak  of invisibility,
comes an increase of our other faculties:
life wisdom, extra-sensory perception,
a heightened radar system.

From behind our convenient disguise
as aging-persons,
we can interpret
your body language.
We see the lifted brow,
the wry smile.
We can read
your energy.
You reveal so much more
than you think you do.

We nod. We smile.
We keep our silence.
But we can
see
right through you.

posted for Mary's prompt over  at dVerse: invisible . 

To the Forest, Dark and Deep

Owl in a Port Alberni back yard

I thought I'd put my heart into a poem,

and take it to the forest, dark and deep,

find the mossy path, the broken limb,

a perch from which to read the trees to sleep.

So sonorous, all words verdant and green,

so soft the moss, the pages all between.

I turn them, leaf and fern, salal and flower,

sweet and protected, in my leafy bower.

The dark will tiptoe in on doe-like feet,

will settle tenderly upon the boughs,

and I softly away, and smiling sweet,

the forest safe and dreaming deep, for now.

Oh forest dear, my sanctuary blessed,

it is to you I come, when I seek rest.

I was sitting here, blank-headed as always, when the thought arrived to attempt a sonnet. How distinctly odd.