Toad, Not Turtle-Dove

[image from animal.discovery.com]

Disclaimer: The wonderful Kerry at Imaginary Gardens With Real Toads has set us a mini-challenge this weekend, to use an eight-line poem by Yeats as a guide, with  alternating 8, 9 and 10-syllable counts and some repeated words within the lines. I started off seriously enough, but found I could only manage an eight syllable count all the way down. And then I got silly. I will offer it here, as an attempt gone awry, with apologies. But on a rainy Saturday, a smile is always welcome! 

If I were but a turtle-dove,

the whole night through I'd sing to you

my repertoire, all songs of love,

all songs of love, the whole night through.

But I'm a croaky-Toad, I fear.

My songs of love you will not hear.

I'll send you to your bower-bed

with earplugs for your downy head.

Sorry, Kerry. Sometimes I just cant help myself! Click over to Toads, kids. There are sure to be some wonderful responses to this prompt by my fellow Toads.

She Offers Her Life Like a Flower

At Real Toads this weekend, Laura Hedgfield of Shine the Divine: Creativity IS a Spiritual Practice, is featured. Laura is a talented photographer and writer whom I have been following for some time. I was first attracted by her spiritual perspective, and then by her story. Laura lives with Multiple Sclerosis, but she truly rises above it,  inspiring us all with her spirit of gratitude and the way she shines her light.


Her photo above, used with permission, made me think instantly of her life, that she offers up daily for our encouragement and inspiration.

She offers her life

like a blossom,

that we may be

enriched

by her

understanding,

lifted up

by her vision

and inspired

by the illumination

of her spirit.

Shine on, Laura, and thank you for your incredible spirit! You humble me daily with your surrender to What Is and your ability to see a Much Bigger Picture from the window of your room.

Not One Tear for Remembering

[sunrise by NASA]

This is a piece of prose poetry, for Kerry's Wednesday challenge at Imaginary Gardens With Real Toads. I gave it a try and these words spilled out all by themselves, revealing a truth I try not to look at too squarely. Yikes! Gotta watch these poems!


Fix your eye on the north star and turn right before morning. The madman walks between daybreak and hellfire and has fallen. Never say to me that I dont know soaring. I do, but I know it from the safety of the ground and the longing in my heart, always captive, tethered like a  kite in full sail to the hand of the needy. Never tell me that I dont know love for, alone and solitary, I have learned to love the whole world and I carry that love with me like a prayer, like a weeping elegy, like a song of hope that refuses to be muted.

Come my way and I'll show you a bit of the highway you may never have seen, through the eyes of blindness that have been opened. I'll teach you to listen to wolfsong and witch-howl, and we can join in towards the midnight hour, when the longing is too great to be contained within any longer.

I dont know what I'm writing here, it is writing itself, and it is telling me that though I smile and insist on hope, within there is a sorrow, constantly ebbing and flowing like the tide. A sorrow, under the bright smiles and determined hopefulness, as deep as the ocean, and as wide, that dare not, dare not, shed one tear for fear of drowning.