poetry – Jenny Grace's Poetry and Creative Writing Techniques

A Poem: Mirage

Grandma gambled and knew if she lost she would never recoup the cost.

Sage burned in the silver container in the corner; amethyst and orange quartz stones neatly circled the photograph of him and her embracing on the rocky shore of Paracas Bay.

Nobody had bothered to tell them back then on that windy day in 1942 that love was just a mirage.

He nor she would have ever believed it would all eventually crumble like the Incan ruins beneath their foreign feet.

Frame

Red holly berries cluster beneath green leaf canopies; thin branches point skyward, end.

Sunlight, golden, shifts like pantomime against the pale yellow wall.

Window is a picture frame, frames the forest outside the library.

Peaceful. Silence. Calm.

I sit and simply watch the world go by.

Inheritance

Seared into my great-great- grandfather Captain Abraham’s memory,

a battle he fought with long dead enemies.

Curious world dissolving into red Georgia clay,

dust rising up with his history’s burden, a bitter cup.

There is no alibi strewn on the forest floor beneath twigs, weeds, rotten logs.

Footsteps of ghosts dash and dart among leaves and retreating shadows.

His hand lifts up on that far away day on that battlefield, his blue eyes scour the broken world.

Nothing, nothing left, now, except bones beneath that patch of holy ground.

Noni, Counting

Noni Francisca back in her day, scattered rose petals, called out each and every one by its scientific name.

Her memory faded like the shadows that fell across those distant blue hills.

On a bench, at the edge of her garden, wearing her pretty burnt orange cloche, the one she’d worn back in her heyday, she lifted her wrinkled hand and snatched at the memories that fled away.

One, two, three, and so it went, counting the rose petals, with the only words that she had left. . .one, two, three, the numbers that she had loved, the flowers that had been her passion.

Noni Francisca in her garden; her pretty burnt orange cloche a testament to her elegance.

Last Sunday in March, a poem

Overcast, grayness sticks to the sky; white dirtied by the rain, lurking, threatening to burst.

Sun struggles to reappear.

I Know Why:

Heaped together strung like imperfectly corded beads, my days slip and scatter to the ground; tapping far off is the thought hidden that dispatches those rude awakenings that all is not well on the outside of the cocoon in which I have sequestered myself.

Ordered pair:

Never existed, except in geometry.

Disorder is the caveat that has to be simply accepted.

Slope downhill from here accelerated by lack of energy.

Urgency

Window side world in a coffee shop; youth in fragments on a hot May afternoon.

Studying for college finals, sipping coffee, not grasping the urgency of time’s passing.

Outside, sun bears down on broken asphalt.

Voices spill out, laughter fills up the retreating spaces.

What is the balance of these moments, the passing of these youthful days?

Extraordinary in the Ordinary

Sunny, warm Saturday, in a past season; but, the season of thankfulness never changes.

Blue birds and red cardinals are soaring across the pale blue sky, alight on branches of the oak trees that form a leafy green canopy.

Wet red and blue wings splash in the little white birdbath next to my lavender rose bush; warm breeze rustles the brown leaves.

God has been so good to me; I can see the kaleidoscope of colors, hear the melody of birds chirping and skittering in the branches swaying high above me; I can feel the warmth of sunlight touch my skin.

I can taste the sweetness of strawberries in the oatmeal I had for breakfast; I can stand in this ordinary moment and raise my hands in thankfulness to my God who has been so good to me.

To my God who has blessed me with breath, who has held me in the palm of his hand, who has lifted me up and let me see the extraordinary in the ordinary.

Acorns

Imperial palaces glint golden.

Gossamer blue butterfly wings descend,

downward to the rotting ruins of human hubris.

Antiquity,

arcs like a dome over disappearing dynasties.

Collapsing columns stagger beneath the sun’s eternally angry inferno.

In that dream, Grandfather turns to me and tells me our home had been on that ancient shore where the sea blindingly blue had deceived him as a young man.

With a sweep of his tanned, wrinkled hand he signals to that incomprehensible emptiness that occupies our American space.

Midwinter moon.

Grandfather, like mist, slips away.

Taking with him that last thread of my connection to that world time erased.

Last Shabbat

Rabbi waves good-bye; street lights, like halos, cast sidelong shadows against the Spanish moss swaying in warm evening of late July.

Voices fall away; moonlight lingers, follows me down the broken cobblestone path.

Last Shabbat; shadows cast against my face. I turn and wave good-bye.

This poem is from my poetry book “Spaces Between the Pause.” It is available on Amazon Books. I haven’t yet put it on Kindle.

Thanks for reading.

Thunder: A Poem

Thunder trolls the universe

slapping against invisible canopies.

Silence, a stunned casualty.