POETRY

Two of the characters in a story I'm working on are poets, so recently I've had to try writing poetry. In the first poem, my adolescent heroine attempts to explain her rebelliousness to her guardian.  In the second, my heroine discovers a terrible family secret in an aunt's poetry. And in the third, one aunt admires the work of the other.

Force of Nature

I shake my fist at the heavens and curse the wind and the rain.
I stomp through the fields and toss about armfuls of flowers and weeds that I have torn from the soil.
I splash in the mud and throw stones into puddles.
I heave sticks at ducks rising from the lake and chase deer through the forest like a wolf.
But my rage affirms the rain and celebrates the wind,
The muddy patch grows richer and wider with my stomping about,
And my chase makes the heart of the deer grow stronger.
In my anger and opposition, I celebrate the power of the world around me.
I am become one with the forces that oppose me.
Every waving blade of grass makes manifest the fire inside the earth.
Clouds racing across the sky roll and tumble with its energy,
And sometimes the clouds cannot contain it and it shatters the sky with white heat and the roar of cannons.
Winds swirl with rage and batter themselves against walls and cliffs and trees,
And so shall I rant and rail and race across the firmament.
The earth is not a place for the weak and the wary.
I will not be the prey, the stone that is worn away by the rain, or the tree that is splintered by the storm.
I shall be the wind, the rain, the wild animal on the hunt.
I shall be a force of nature.

Gone

The air beneath our larder floor
Smells of earth and spuds and beer.
The silence of the crawlspace
Mutes pain and tears and fear
I lie on soil and still my heart,
And dream that I’m not here.
And when my father stumbles home and finds that I am gone,
I dream he’s wracked with endless guilt and tortured to the bone.
And then perhaps I’ll weep. And then perhaps I’ll sleep.

To Sing of Thyme

Her brushes dance across the page and tempt faeries from their hedgerows.
“Will you paint us?” they cry. “Will you paint our faery ways and tales?”
“Yes, if you will sing for me,” she replies with a flourish of vermillion.
So the faeries sing of thyme, because to sing of thyme is to sing of love and sorrow.
Thyme--device of heroes, accolade of maidens, consoler of the broken.
In return, she weaves her strokes together like threads in the finest tapestry.
While faeries splash across her work in pools of blue and teal and plum,
And send droplets dancing like petals in a breeze, 
She, with strokes that merely kiss the page, entwines their faery world
In vines and stems and blossoms of deepest reds and greens,
Dusts each nymph in gold, captures each wing in a silver whisper.
Beloved sorceress, beneath whose brush each twist of thyme
Becomes an enchanted landscape without blemish or shame or pain.