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On the black canvas
Carve the thunders
Streaks of neon glow,
The drums the heaven beats
On their way to the earth
Rend the air apart,
The ground in ******* anticipation
Vibrates in a rediscovered titillation,
The soil waits holding its breath
In the last climactic lull
Before it’s released from the pain,
Unmindful, I open my umbrella
In the season’s first rain!
 Jan 2016
Traveler
We awaken to the early show
So vividly underway
With just a hint of the morning dew
The night before had laid
A breeze so mild it forces a smile
Of fresh new forest green
Busy squirrels and singing birds
Enjoy all that life will bring

The laughing cry of the loons and swallows
On the lake so old and free
The presence of Indian spirits
In the surrounding ancient trees

Dragonflies like fairies fly
Embrace the tortoise shell
Yellow flowers on the lily pads
Where croaking bullfrogs dwell
Crawdads and minnows
Reminisce of yesteryear
When we were only children
Still wet behind the ears...
 Jan 2016
Aztec Warrior
CHALLENGES**

This spirit journey, dream walk starts with a single step taken while standing on the very edge of the precipice, over looking the path of truth far below. Not the abstraction of a never reaching truth, or the truth of some idealist, subjective plane of reality, but a reality that serves humanity, its desires to dream and make real an earth of no pain.

For too long we have only blindly followed the world, known only its suffering and seen its vast oceans of tears shed for many millennia. We have felt the wounds festering in our souls, tasted the salty bitterness of broken promises and wasted lives, even as we have worked and toiled with all our might.

So much is yet to be done though this dream journey has already begun. Soaring along the condor’s wind, breathing in the crisp snowy air as it washes us clean, savoring each crystalline speck, we follow the gathering avalanche as it cleanses the earth in newness along with our ability to know how to fulfill our collectivity, our humanity.

In tomorrow’s land, where wolves have learned to whisper to elk and bear; where our journey’s dream continues, I will still step off the precipice edge seeking truth as it knows and changes the world. Perhaps you too will walk and stare with me at the night’s sky and hear the songs our ancient ancestors sang to the galactic winds.

~~Aztec Warrior/redzone 5.5.04~~
I was looking back through my notebook again and found this poem of some years ago. This one was also written using "redzone" as my pen name... hope you enjoy reading
 Jan 2016
Tanisha Jackland
Do not be eager
to make Her into
your own image.
For She is the beginning
and the end.
We have lived within
Her and died there.
Her energy is this wild sacred
vacancy of creation.
Come be delivered
from the root of
Her womb and
be forever set free.
"The mystery of the valley is immortal; It is known as the Dark and Subtle Female. The gateway of the Dark and Subtle Female Is the source of the Heaven and Earth." - Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
 Jan 2016
Leslie Philibert
Gather the crowberries for the windfeast.

Adorning our cheeks with ochre
                       we gather together
                       a throne of old rowan.

The staggards behind us ;
                       warm breath at our napes.
                       We are as careful as a circle.

So a keening for the wild flightsman,
                       the hewer of stone, blood-iron hearted,
                       now dead as a distant star
                       that points the way of smoke, of fire.

But for a moment the wind resides.
 Jan 2016
Tanisha Jackland
Does every word come
dripping from
your mouth, immortal?

You rare oddity
Spinning me open
As if I were air on fire

How you would gather
yourself up
like you were
something irrelevant
in my presence

Oh shy but fluent bird
Tell me of what lovers bring
Tell me you were Shakespeare
Whispering in my ear
 Dec 2015
Robert C Howard
Earth (Pangaea)

Pangaea heaved and shifted
beneath the fire-storm sky.
Colliding plates and spewing mountains
shook, roared and thundered
under the brutal chaos
of torrential cataclysms.

In time she yielded her ire
to millennia of pacific rains -
her severed crust
set adrift across the oceans
like gigantic earthen rafts.

Jungles sprang up and terrible lizards
came, grazed and left their bones.
Forests, grains and multifarious beasts
grew and perished in accord
with their past and future destinies.

So here we are - earthbound,
tossed from our mothers' wombs -
fated to live and breed
by the grace of miracles
far beyond our ken.

Beloved mother Gaia,
from whose dust we are raised,
nurture and sustain us
and sing us to our mortal sleep.

2. Air

Air - earth's miracle brew of
     oxygen, nitrogen and all the rest
          meted out in perfect harmony.

Air - silent and still on a moonlit night -
     driver of sheeted rain on window panes -
          and winds that shake the trembling aspens.

Air - author of land and ocean squalls -
     bringer of that ominous pallor
          that presages a tornado's furor

Air - invisible aerial highway
     for majestic eagles and turbo-jets -
         medium of rhetoric and symphonies.

Air – window to the cosmos
      and our fragile life–giving broth -
          unwitting conveyer of toxic alchemy.

Keep watch my sisters and brothers:
     the air we breathe is what we make it
          or rather what we let it be.

3. Water

Water like a capricious deity
     wanders through time and topography -
     cherished and cursed for
     what it gives and what it takes away.

Gentle rains and strident gales
     sculpt rivers and streams
     through forests and plains
     bound for union with the open sea.

Diurnal tides ebb and wane
     at the whim of the charismatic moon.
     Ice mountains advance and retreat;
     rock-strewns moraines left in their wake.

Turbulent currents
     soar over jagged cataracts,
     spraying pastel prisms
     across the misted valleys.

Beneath our all too fragile skins,
     secret sanguine rivers navigate
     our veins and arteries
     bathing organs, limbs and sensors
     with curative balm and sustenance.

Wellspring of all elements,
     fill our daily ladles
     and grant us the will and empathy
     to bequeath the same to our progeny.

4. Fire

Two hundred million years ago
our Paleolithic cousins
seized branches from a burning forest
and stepped into a bold new world.

By the glow of fire-lit caves,
and the scent of searing venison,
they gathered wits and tools
to craft shelters and weaponry.

Their children's children would design
forges and furnaces, factories
and build engines that run on fire.

But their anxious siblings in despair
snatched lightning from the sky
and twisted by fits of anger pride
made also muskets, missiles, bombs
and nuclear Armageddons.

Loki, god of nobler flames
open our blood-stained eyes
and show us the means
to stay our arson lust and
abide by the light of reason.

*Revised and integrated version, December, 2015
These four poems are aligned with a set of piano preludes of the same title completed 12-21-2016. Here is a link to the music https://clyp.it/user/1qruizko
 Dec 2015
SE Reimer
~

solstice = sun stopped; in the case of winter solstice,
the moment when the sun ceases its journey northward
from the earth’s equator and turns southward toward
longer days; much like the journey our sun takes,
love solstice then is that moment of
arrest and redirect for one’s direction of travel
in life... and in this, the moment
a Sagittarian and Capricornian
separated on two sides of the solstice,
turn, collide and coalesce.


~

hers,
the waning side,
winter's reprise,
calls to the night,
at height of eventide.
his,
on ebbing turn,
the sun's reverse,
together rise to step
as one at winter's ball.
their dance across the sky
'neath moonlit nights.
two in love,
in lockstep of
the stars above,
collide and coalesce,
their waltz amidst
the delicate pearls of
a Milky Way stage!
no more his lonely
path among the stars;
his heart she's swept,
to never dance alone;
her arrow sent with bow,
piercing to the marrow,
holds his life,
his very soul.
bold and daring,
her voice of caring,
soothes his troubled heart.
he, her promise, calls
to her adven’trous heart,
two stepping toward
a rising warming sun,
in birth that spans
the space and time between,
forever now as one;
this their solstice of love!

~

post script.

*she (late Sagittarian) is the setting-sun-kissed, rain-misted huntress,
he (early Capricornian) is the rising sun's icicled traveler.  
mere days separating their arrival, though theirs could not be
more varied.  their births under different signs; his in the wintry
heartland, hers in the sun-kissed southwest; individually they are fire
and ice, huntress and wanderer who together have captured,
captivated each the other’s heart.  you’re not likely to see them
separately, but when you do, it’s only briefly when resupplying
their home, their hearth, their hearts. two making a most unlikely one,
but oh so surprisingly, so beautifully passionate!
 Dec 2015
K Balachandran
Hear this beloved river, in halcyon days
I was loyal to this majestic tree, I am attached,
to the sun I often spoke how loving
the tree is to me, and how eager I too am
to transfer sun's boons to my object of adoration.

Each season did visit us, with a  message
different, and I gathered this with joy:
The tree is a book of nature for all to read
and get exhilarated by the poems colorful
that speak in metaphors the tree invent
with water from  it's heart and sun's fire
working the magic only a tree is capable of
to show us as  flowers, fruits or  seeds that, attract
satiate, drive to the pinnacle of aesthetic delight
at times  create forests of future,with a vision too.

I am just a word, with a limited meaning I hold,
in the book of the tree ,that contains millions like me
my unconditional love to the tree is my fulfillment,
in return he loves every word that make his poem complete.

We were in love all through the time I was green,
the day I wore  yellow, got crinkled at the ends,I began
to think of you, river, with a devotion unknown until then,
though you a silver ribbon, was in my eye view , singing a song
of mirth flowing towards the unknown, imagined in our dreams

Our lives, at turns take directions that are not known
the tree once all I have is now from my world detached
flying down from the branch now a freedom I enjoy
receive me on your bellowing bed of water, comfortable
Let's flow together to the beloved destination,you've in mind.
 Dec 2015
Sana
If only I could preserve her motherhood in a bottle of glass, I could have forever slept in the luminous embrace of its hypnotic tenderness.
Dedicated to every mother at HP.
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