"For the Solstice"

Shoe polish soot dusts my soul

Charcoal pitted O lives pressed
Crushed beneath the sack
of ink jet black
ness

Enveloped in dark room
Hemmed in and still captured
There, developing in silver salts

The light is returning

William - If It Be Your Will - is a beautiful prayer of surrender.
Mortals without masks are the "broken hills" Cohen writes about
so well.

Dave - "The light is returning" - A perfect Kodak Solstice


[C'mon, Grumpy - Smile]

Happy Holidays and best wishes for peace and good health to all!

Happy Christmas to all the amazing Wordsmiths and contributors to the Just Poetry Thread

Here's to a funny, angst ridden, passionate, entertaining, whirlwind, thoughtful and ever enlightening 2015


Dave

This Year

We wonder what happened to it

this year

we are not so old that
it should have gone so fast
taking with it all those moments
we thought would linger awhile
for the savoring

this year our first
in this new home
made of an old house
this brittle shell
shelters these bodies
growing brittle too rapidly
when we had barely begun
to remake them young
seeing their true purpose as if
for the first time

and now they force us to watch them
keeping pace with the new creaks in the wood
and cracks snaking up the plaster

each day should have been a year
to give us the extra time we needed to figure it out
this newness we made from tedious familiarity
this year we approached like giddy freshmen
eager for study and practice away from home
on our own with our baggage stuffed in the closets

we needed the time yet
to heedless time need is irrelevant
a beggar pleading
and if we ask ourselves
what we have learned
and whether we have planted
that lesson solidly in our selves
or whether we will have to learn it
over again each day

why
we must answer truthfully

this year was a bullet train
rushing us with it
the landscape etched and gauzy
rapturous and tortured
as we passed through it
we soaked in it
were made rich by it
this year
we would always have it
we would capture it in clear memory
to recall when we need its lessons
for how could we forget such clarity
surely the lessons became wisdom

but now it seems that our new world
flashed by in a blur
wisdom demands more time
than was granted us this year

and we can only expect
that every year will be as fleeting
unfairly so
and that the further back
we look over our life together
the faster time will seem to have fled

if moments lingered
they would not be moments
but our time together
beginning with this year
gives us each this
a surrogate for its fleeting self
we can entrust our life’s million moments
not to memory but to one another
our year incarnated in us
and therein will lie our wisdom

outside of time and beyond this year

"outside of time and beyond this year"
---------------------------------------------

We've shed the months of the old year

Like yesterday's clothes.

If we only knew...

The joyful moments blotting out sadness

Not lost but stored in memory banks

Withdrawn as needed.

Is that enough -

Tightly held jewels of regret and

Loneliness fill the void.

A new year begins bereft of light

An intricate part no longer there.

If we only knew...

-1/1/15

------------------------------------------------------------
I'll Tell You a Tale of a Mountainside:

"one must first discern its source"