
A silent walk
through the past and present seasons
coexisting finally
peacefully in me.
Poet. Writer. Photographer.

A silent walk
through the past and present seasons
coexisting finally
peacefully in me.


Nature has a way
of knowing
us so personally:
when is the last
time you slowed
or stopped to notice,
to receive,
the messages
in clouds
and leaves?


Love is not a fall
except in the tender embrace
at last season’s end
just before
The Rising.
A morning photography stroll on a leg of local Blackwater Heritage State Trail, embracing the capricious Southern weather, hoping to find some silent stories and enchantment:














I’ve photographed last sunsets and first sunrises of new-year transitions before and was not feeling it this time, but as the sun was revealed on our first-again rotation to greet it, I did decide to quickly depart to go pay tribute at my favorite local spot, especially since my own thoughts and feelings about New Year’s everything were disruptively in disaccord. So off I went, almost-regretfully-now past sunrise from indecisiveness but also confident when I feel the tug, the where and when always has its own divine purpose. At least it was early enough to have most of the “world” to myself.
My decision came with the peace, cleansing, and renewal I knew it would as I got to leisurely take in and photograph the grand and minute, having the downtown riverwalk all to myself. If you’ve read or viewed my previous work, you know how obsessed I’ve always been since moving to this historic little city with my bridge (and trains) here, my soul somehow connected to it in a home-like way, at least as a familiar stop in the sure direction of home. It’s fitting I start here again; it’s where I left off with this post almost a year ago when I took way too long of a break from writing and photographing, from myself:

That last year, and the one before, and perhaps all of the ones back to my childhood… let’s just say, this is the first one I can remember that I am beginning healthy, healed, and free. So maybe I will embrace this next revolution. Perhaps this is the one in which I find home. It already started with a Day One smile when that “where and when” of that tug revealed itself so personally to me:











All images©️LauraDenise

@bylauradenise on Instagram

I always get there early
in the section to myself
and wait in the dark
for her to reveal herself.
Ahead of her core,
her aura swirls the void,
until the rebirthing beauty
is granted to my eyes.

Withering weed
behind chain-link fence
produces the illusion
of being defenseless,
unable to escape
to freedom,
but the thing
about dandelions
is the way God made them,
for big are the dreams
they are charged with,
but it is in their breaking apart
into pieces that launches
these seeds of more
to be rebirthed elsewhere,
carried protectively upon benevolent breeze
and prayer
in different directions
better for us,
for when dead ends surround,
the ways are through
or up,
toward The Light,
and wing-bathed in hope,
blind-ride flight right through
the wide-open holes,
or one cracked window…

Poem and images ©LauraDenise

By clinging together,
raindrops resist
at the edge
of the cliff,
the abyss,
at the border between
life
and the cracking brown
that begs for tears
to re-quench
what has already been
drowned:
concrete, manmade.
How futile it is to keep
watering the pain.
Green and blue
reflect and infuse,
ever so gently pull
toward better use:
decide instead
to feed growth
and desert these looping
barren roads.
Poem and image ©LauraDenise

I gently lay
my heart to rest
upon a sea-oat-
suspended hammock
and let my Maker
tenderly sway
through the breeze
my cradled malaise,
and after this dose
of soaking wounds in warm gold,
I’ll convert this sling
to sail boat…