That Kiss

melting into your kiss –

a recurring memory I hang onto

to keep me sane

to say goodbye

to move on

Pat

2/21/23

For poetics over at dVerse where Kim is hosting and we’re talking ‘kisses’. To participate or just read go here.

Portly Grit!

This pink flower is the heather. It beams from the clutter of a garden still under the spell of winter. Each year it gets stouter, more portly. It starts flowering in November or December. I am surprised every time. I wonder how such dainty looking blooms survive such cold. Grit, I suppose.

Next to the heather is the coneflower. That too tends to want to spread out. Only, it wakes up much later. It is always interesting to watch these two jossle.

That side of the garden is ‘survival of the fittest territory’. I am taking lessons and aligning myself with their determination and grit. As such, I am squeezing you out of my thought process. This gift you came to appreciate way too late will no longer swim in thoughts of you! This year’s a different thing, –
I’ll not think of you.

Pat

2/14/23

For prosery Monday over at dVerse where Merril is hosting and the prompt is to incorporate the following lines into the prose

“This year’s a different thing, –
I’ll not think of you.”

from Charlotte Mew, “I so liked Spring”

Go here to participate or just read

Grit

Ida is an old soul and the fiercest person I know. She was blessed with an abundance of that ‘no nonsense and why the hell not’, attitude.

Conversations this time had awakened deep feelings.

What must it be like going somewhere, and not know that feeling of sticking out like a sore thumb. Or, not having to endure the stares and the under- their- breaths mutterings.

Such feelings were never really shared out loud, they didn’t have to. They knew, being in the skin they were in. Ida too, had experienced this. On one occasion she was heard to say,

‘I didn’t know I was black till I came to America’. She would not elaborate.

But this too she tackled this with her attitude of “no, I do not weep at the world – I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife*.” This attitude had served her well; and serves her still.

Pat
7/20/21

*Zora Neale Hurston

Over Time

I never could see my life without him
But there stood this broken trust

Shoving past all that I had come to know would only lead to regrets piled atop regrets –
never again feeling safe

As great as this love was
I knew me
It would not end well
So, I let it go in the most awful way
Never to see, or speak to him for ever
Time is not always the healer
she purports to be
Years later when we could again speak
He asked.
I explained.
That was not about you, I said.
That was about keeping that thread I was hanging by intact.

Pat R
6/22/21

Isn’t it pretty to think so.
–The Sun Also Rises (1926). Ernest Hemingway

Over at dVerse we are to write a poem based on a chosen quote from Hemingways work. I chose the above.

Linking to dVerse Poets Pub where Lisa is hosting Poetics -“One true sentence” . To read other entries go here