A Turning of Seasons
after
Tom Hennan's “In The Late Season”
Have you looked at lines
until they become a box, a house?
Petroglyphs of stick figures,
become men, women, deer, coyotes.
Cartoon sun, moon, stars
resolve to a map, a calendar.
Someone lived their life by them,
the hunting, planting, harvesting.
Marks meant magic – and knowledge.
They felt the same rock vibrations,
the heat leached into it from the sun,
the heartbeat of the seasons passing.
Like a snatch of lost language
heard in folk tales something calls to us.
Millennia, aeons pass.
The stars are the same.
Deep down,we're the same,
still seeking knowledge
and magic.
Prayer in the shadow of the serpent's slither
After John Slaby's artwork "The Serpent"
Flickering screens let the world in
all the
wickedness, hate and sin
Big Cup, burger, pill bottle spills
medicines for every
ill
Fifth of cheap booze, Jesus statue, candle
a prayer for
everything I can't handle
Ashtray filled with stubbed out butts
Venus statue
slashed with cuts
Old take-out cartons, half full wine glass,
hope that my bad
thoughts will pass
Visualise and manifest
try to conjure up
the best
Photos, postcards, old iPhone
why do I still feel so alone?
Sometimes it travels at
night with the snowfall
a cento
after Mary Oliver
this morning again it was in the dusty pines
a certain sharpness in the morning air
a bitterness, acid
October, first snow entering the kingdom
lonely white fields
the night traveller
the black snake sleeping in the forest
some questions you might ask a visitor,
little owl who lives in the orchard,
maybe one or two things
when death comes
white owl flies into and out of the field
crossing the swamp, the river Styx
happiness, a dream of trees
morning in a new land on winter's margin
Source: this cento uses the titles of poems by Mary
Oliver in "Mary Oliver: New and Selected Poems Volume 1" (Beacon
Press, 1992).
Emily Tee is a writer living in the UK Midlands. Her poems and flash fiction have appeared in a variety of places online and in print, including recent work in The Poetry Lighthouse, The Hooghly Review, Gypsophila Zine and the Lines of Communication Anthology by The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press.
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