in summer

I miss you dear Persephone
although you're not long gone I know
but summer's heat is killing me
I miss you dear Persephone
down here in the Antipodes
we swelter, feeling great sorrow
I miss you dear Persephone
although you're not long gone I know

in autumn

I've always wanted to be known
as the girl who was always laughing.
Someone carefree and whimsical.
A voice that can make you float to the clouds
and lay there next to her
not worrying of how much time has passed
and spending forever
telling stories and dancing through the sky
because nothing else mattered.

The little songbird does not enter
sunrise with fear
having slept through the night
with his ancestral doubt.

He is not troubled by who listens
and if there are others of his kind
to join in perfect harmony.

He just sings and sings as if daylight itself
depended on his song.

And the song meets the ear
the ear hears the heart
and the heart hears the pauses
in the smallest of
ceremonies,
a vibrancy of unconditional grace,
tugging
the tuning fork of the sattvic mind.

He came from the place
where the mulga scrub
can dress his garden grand,
Where rivers full of bracken dust
Sleep in this ravaged land

Where shade is sparse and precious held
By the bush men far out west,
And waters sort like gold below
In the land he thought was blessed,

He didn’t want to leave his wife
twelve years of arrant dry,
The swirling dust the song it sang
words hopeless in the sky,

Why don't you wash your weary thoughts,
and brush out your heavy woes and pains.
Wipe out those tears in eyes,
and sweep everyday's miseries away.
Bleach all the stained ,
and the spotted hatreds in your heart
clean it all and say:
Hey..
"Everything is gonna be OKAY."

I shaved my head and beard today
but it didn’t take away
the feeling I had crawled
recently from a dumpster,
although I felt meaner.
And a little colder.

the sun is going down,
the wine is running red,
I'm feeling awake,
someone else might soon be dead.

Meaner and colder
is fine by me
a life lived in lead
is the final dread.

the water clear
escapes the touch

and falls

I can hear you picking
up the keys
the bass chords
the pedal shifts

Love is a mystery
fraught with the ruin of
leaving
Just when the echo of
Hello has opened
the frame
of possible
hope

a piano lives
a soul walks
the hallway

these ghosts of us

gusts reach walls
we built
the stones of
work like bones
sleeping

this warmth gathered
curved against it

Roses are my favorite flowers
The reds growing outside my school
is blooming so gracefully
behind the stone fence I sat on

The round silver globe of the world
Sits carefully in the front courtyard
Water sprinkling up from her pond
Sparkle like diamonds in the sun

I love this time of year
Springtime is in the air
When all that's dead in winter
spring back to life in spring
©barbara writes

Intangible, soft colours gently drift
in streams of many tones, across the void -
creation's water's vibrant, bejewelled gift
there for my humble eyes, to be enjoyed

But truly too far distant to behold
for vision that's contained by time, confined
to me its symmetry will yet unfold
when my soul-self, again, is re-defined

I'll leave behind this dirt I've worn and trod
exchange it then for light of fiery essence
and be set loose to wander throughout god
in galleons of lustrous luminescence

From the original:

Anni, (Cloudthings) new Prose entry:

When I sit on a verandah in the autumn afternoon, watching the leaves glow chrimson or saffron bright in the late, rich sunlight, I wonder what it is that makes our hearts echo that glow so deeply?

Sitting in my back room, writing letters to a friend, long absent, playing “artist in residence” in Korea, I gaze out my big window to get lost in the swaying, shifting mass of gum leaves against the sky. Again, mesmerized and somehow fulfilled and inspired by the interplay of tree and weather.