Tag: California

Inferno ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #214

The day ended as an inferno
Sea and sky wracked with enmity
A calamity of chaos

But for the gulls
Soaring with graceful ardour

Placid amidst the tumult

The road leads down
A scabrous red cut
Into a valley of death

The azure sky
Suspended upon its downy bed
Of purest white

Extremes of a year’s journeys
Found in a single switchback descent
Just ahead of a desert sunset

Somehow, I find
All of it
Beautiful

Sometimes the darkness
Is less a lack of light
Than a quality of seeing

As the tears dry
I remind myself
Even deserts know the rain

In the high desert
Where the land is wide
And the sky wider
I cross the expanse
On a knife’s edge of asphalt
Buffeted by furious headwinds

Inside my little cockpit of calm and warmth
I sing “Wassiye! Wassiye!”
With Habib Koite
A song of mirth and joy and love

Just as is the song within me
As I navigate existence
Across the expanse of being
And all its many storms

Sometimes I squint
To smudge the world
Within my mind

Then paint upon
The softened scene
A different

Kind of magic

I am no Poet
Least not in
The classic Poet’s manner

I’ve never studied
What the Poets say
Nor worried much
How they place their words
Or why that way

I do not know
How to write a sonnet
I am not sure
What makes pentameter
Iambic

I hope that’s OK

Necessity creates
Necessity destroys

Intentional purpose
Inexorable decay

Dynamic tension
Eternally entwined

The sky
     like a distant hope
The sea
     is my rolling pain
The land
     oh, it anchors soul

And I
     hold the sky
Let the pain
     roll away
Heel to land
     find my soul

This perfect valley
In the perfect light
With the perfect clouds
Make a perfect moment

This perfect is mine
Not the valley’s
Not the light’s
Not the clouds’

I remind myself
True happiness
Is found in finding
The perfect in everything