We all have shadows, how easily, daily, we forget, ego mostly to protect increasing the brightness, blinding with discordance who you are and who I am, sharing the same thread.
The dark is not blocked light, shadows are not turned-backs, but the yin and yang of life natural inside, what we all have.
Let us all embrace the shades, open ourselves to being stitched into the quilt of human race,
each of our picture shapes turning to color and telling our stories so we may wrap ourselves in a shared comfort.
It’s been sunny and seventies, and the seasons have not so much been confused as they have been seemingly just leisurely mingling, amused, some stalling, some joyfully letting go; nothing in the South rushes though.
Like melting cubes of ice in tea, we take it sweet and slow down here. It tickles me pink to have the mix sprinkling personal messages so clear.
Today started differently, gray with a bit of nip in the air. Certain trees partaking in autumn are almost now bare, covering the patio in a bland blanket over stone, which made the flowers I did not grow even more the focal point of my windowed soul.
I smiled for how they have become so deeply rooted in my journey. Marking my heart’s pages, so many petals and leaves held so dearly, imprinting with their colors and scents my most powerful untold stories.
I have always been drawn to intimacy, that of the petal, the shell, the bee. Grand, sweeping panoramic views have trouble impressing me. Everyone else lines up though to see, so I release the guilt to the benevolent breeze while I sneak away from my party after posing in their pictures to get low upon the mountain surface to hear the gentle, pink, silky whispers.
My first two vacation poems of the same subject, the world-renowned postcard as a blurred backdrop. You can take a body to a different location, but you cannot take control of a soul’s vocation, especially when it is spiritually connected more so to the underfoot details overlooked and neglected.
The stories of nature that fit in the palm of my hand speak to me more profoundly than the grandest canyon. I have never been one to follow the crowds. The bold mountaintop bloom whispers another route.
I cannot take it now: my father is guiding this tour. But I will never forget the brief shared encounter
with the single wildflower
that found me in the clouds and allowed me to recenter myself.
Don’t think my sunny outlook comes from a lifetime of easy; I’ve walked through the dark wood and from depression’s cliff, still find myself sometimes clinging.
I’ve cried my share of flash floods, drowned several lives in the deep, survived decades of verbal abuse, spent my time vowed and banded to Lonely.
I’ve been there and back, having spent most of my life there, but through it all, I kept the marker on where my dreams were buried,
inside a humble chest beneath the patch of wildflowers; I watched the live hues grow as the turpentine slowly stripped my own colors.
But the spirit, like pain, is buried deep, like music in the heart, cannot be reaped by any other, and perhaps the tears upon those wounds are the rain needed to combine with the light of the soul in that long, desolate season,
and we finally figure out how to use that manure to fertilize our strength and desire, and the sprouts from within finally catch fire and rise up to inspire, and the wildflowers burst from that buried chest, breaking the lock from the inside, having had enough of that old non-life.
So when I see all that I now see in each bloom, know I, too, like you, am the seed, the petals, the stem, the story, the roots.
Lone fisherman at the sea
I watch as the sun begins to bleed
into the horizon and the golden
makes a moment of the scene
that in turn seeps into me
and coats in a honey so sweet
each of my memories and dreams.
The fisherman fades in footsteps away
into the sunrise of a thousand days,
and I paint upon the canvas of my soul
a thousand stories I do not know.
amidst the fallen sacrificial death of green a seedshell opens
Against a hurricane-weathered fence held up by a deeply-rooted meek tree, as the southern seasons strive to change, a branch extends a unique offering,
and in it, I naturally see…
the inspirational bravery of opening up so vulnerably, for beneath the protective shell lies for another’s winter the hope-story for spring.
Laura Denise 