She was a real person.
She would not have been happy on a pedestal.
She took chances.
“What have you got to lose?” she’d say.
She enjoyed every moment
and knew the time to laugh and sing was now.
She not only smelled the roses
she planted, grew, and tended them lovingly.
Every day in my life I loved my mother.
Every day in my life I always will.
#140
Tall and stately they begin,
row upon row of buds,
cool green with only a blushing hint
of the colours yet to come.
Days grow longer and hotter.
Buds burst upwards in an orgy
of sun worshipping colour.
robin’s egg to midnight,
some with dainty white trim like
gingerbread on the eaves,
and one the colour of chocolate and milky coffee.
Drunk with warm, summer rain,
they gargle bees in their throats and
stagger beneath the weight of their own beauty.
They lean on each other and fall spillikins.
Too late I tie them to their canes
Dry now, their seasonal duty done,
seeds ripen into death rattles
and spill across the pale golden bones,
hollow and brittle.
I collect the remains, inter them
in the compost pile, and wait.
Next spring, when the delphiniums
are born again, I will lay the essence
of their predecessors at their feet.
#139
Lingering like the light on the lilac leaf
in a lacy limbus where it lies.
listening to the lyric of a liquid laugh,
Lilting like a lonely lullaby.
The lady lives in limbo in a long lament
learning lovelorn litanies of lies
from less than lovely letters from her long lost love,
luckless lapses littering her life.
She lets the loathsome letters linger lightly in her lap
then looks at light laid on the lilac limb
then laughs at love and listens to the lazy lullaby
and lets the lilting loose her lock on him.
#138
Life is like a watercolour painting;
lots of pretty colours to play with
but work it too hard and you get mud.
Mud is like love;
soft and fun to play in
but it’s slippery and tends to leave stains.
Stains are like road maps;
clues to who or what we’ve been
but sometimes they smother beauty.
Beauty is like a watercolour;
glowing and capricious
but only a reflection of life.
#137
My mother’s quilt hangs on the wall.
Sometimes I touch it lightly as I walk by
Its softness reminds me of her skin and
the colours remind me of her gardens.
She loved her gardens.
I remember her rose trees,
tall as me and covered with blood red roses.
Come fall she’d loosen the soil around their roots,
lay them in a trench, and bury them.
Spring would bring the resurrection.
The stark, dirty sticks would waken,
leaf out, and bloom again.
A botanist would tell you it was a technique,
a method of wintering roses.
But I think they came back each year
because they loved my mother.
I touch the quilt again.
#136
Yesterday I went home again and
felt the dirt beneath my nails.
The light was rare and clean and
I saw everything so clearly,
even the ghosts of potential,
like shadows of the future,
stood out in stark relief.
Yesterday I went home again
and everything that is,
or could ever be right,
came to greet me,
eager and loving,
like a loyal dog waiting
at the end of the driveway for my return.
I will go home again soon
and become one with those friendly shadows,
pat that loyal dog, and dream
dreams that sprout
from the dirt beneath my nails.
#135
| A | I dream love’s moonlit hero went for | I |
| L | a swim in the moon, forever rooted | L |
| O | onto waves of terror. Hemmed in | I |
| N | with a foredoom no mere rest | V |
| E | reforms. I woo the dormant | E |
| morrow adrift on moths |
An odd, self imposed torture and I believe, an original form, each line is an anagram of the one previous (first line is anagrammed from the title) with two letters removed. These removed letters form a type of acrostic, as they spell out the first three words in the title.
Since I think I just invented this poetic form, I’ll call it a Lindacs Poem, until someone bursts my inventive bubble and informs me otherwise!
#134
(see the Scathing Nausic Lingle-Part I)
I finched the bramblers all aside,
for days I piltched the bingles
to cassigate the brachy voice
that peached my nausic lingles
“I’ll show him scathing” I decarte
“I’ll nimby up his yard”
“No scarcher slyths my warbling
and sconders very far.”
And gleering down I peer it
a simble squelchy splucker
splatted from the paddy paws
of a squelchy squishel hucker
“Come firth, you bonk” I gargled
“Come, peach me in the jowl.”
But all that driffs the sillig
is a far to farther growl.
I girt my sissels joculent
I wendle on my way
“I’ll find you, hucker mucker,
If it takes all bastic day!”
When I was a child I rode a centrifuge.
Excitement keening in my stomach,
strapped in, giggling,
wide eyed to new sensations.
Then whirling,
the dip and swoop,
the sunny amusement park
careening around and around.
Colours blurring into squeals
of delight and fear.
Then dizzy,
staggering back to the
routine pace of the day to day,
clutching memories to be taken out
on gray days.
How was I to know?
Life is a centrifuge.
#132
The taste upon the tongue
The smoke within the lungs
that satisfies and numbs
the foolish cravings.
Adrenaline that rushes
through fear and near death brushes.
The candy coated crutches
not worth saving.
The long familiar rut
is comfortable but
a feeling in the gut
says change is needed .
The need to question why
we do these things and try
to be honest in reply
and then to heed it.
#131
Linda Studley 