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Denel Kessler Jan 2016
Petite arctic terns
navigate the sky
on epic migration
wings clocking
45,000 miles each year

it seems they know
how to go
with the flow
by thumbing a lift
on atmospheric airways

that crisscross the planet
adding thousands of
seemingly needless miles
to an already
arduous journey

flocks congregate
in open ocean
to rest and fuel up
on fish and krill
for the last push home

these tenacious birds
understand
the cliché
it's all about
the journey

they synchronize
with invisible currents
because to beat
into the wind
is a futile expenditure

they pause
in community
to re-energize and feed
on unfathomable
bounty

four ounces
of feather
and hollow bone
instinctively holds
these truths

there is much
to be learned
from an
arctic
tern.
Humor me...
: )
CK Baker  Apr 2017
Sotavento
CK Baker Apr 2017
Willets cull the seawall
snapper on the grill
rock ***** swoon
in shallow lagoons
long boats pass
under quiet
palm shade

Plovers dance and flutter
handrails frayed and torn
graffiti spots
at lovers rock
frigate-birds fall
from a high
noon sun

Thatched roof on a mud wall
fish flags settle score
anchors arch
in front line march
pillar cracks form
under rust brown scars

Elegant tern and grebe
watchmen fall in cue
children play
on crested waves
whimbrels and notchers
perch above Tentaciones

Striped pelícanos
the bandits of the sea!
merchants grow
in steady flow
siblings jostle
in a tide cooled sand

Heerman gull and boobie
durango smoke in yurt
boiler shrimp
and puffer blimp
castle buckets and scrapers
under a dusk light cheroot

Six pulls on a lead line
painted toes in sand
shearwater run
in a rainbow sun
the portly mexicano
flaunts his tacos
and wares

Rooster house for swordfish
bamboo shoots and sails
broken shells
and ocean swells
rise
on the
perfect
La Ropa bay
Nigel Morgan Apr 2013
after the painting by Mary Fedden

I kept seeing her around and about, but mostly on the beach. This is a small community and after five years or so I know who everyone is, except those who visit in the summer, though I am getting to know some of the regulars. I reckon she’s my age. When she looks at me in the store, and I look at her and smile, her smile tells me these things.

I have trouble with my hair. It’s thinned and doesn’t grow quite as it should. When I was pregnant and then nursing my children it was positively luxuriant. But later, and despite medical advice (and treatment I was unsure about and abandoned) it became an embarrassment, until he reassured me (just once) and I became an ‘adored woman’. He never ever spoke of it again and loved me so wholly and beautifully I had no reason for it to matter in his company, in his arms.

But seeing her, and often on the beach, more and more regularly, seeing her with her mane of strong dark brown hair flowing behind her in the wind, I felt a curious desire for such a wealth of hair. In fact, I began to feel something stir in me that was desire of a different kind. I can’t think I had ever looked at a woman in quite that way in any previous life. It was always men I sought, I wanted.

Her name is Sara, no h, just an A at the end. She said that when I eventually introduced myself. We were walking towards each other, barefoot both on that glistening skin of water the sea creates between the tides coming and going. It was about midday and I was, I was thinking and walking. I do this now. I don’t bring my sketchbook, I don’t look everywhere I can and more so, I have begun to retreat into my most private self. Perhaps it’s my age and so many years of feeling I had to be wholly attentive and active. Being in this remote place, almost permanently, has slowed me down, and I have begun to dream, to see beyond what I usually would have seen moment to moment. I’ve been re-reading the prose and poetry of Kathleen Raine, who understood this sea-swept place and was haunted by its ghosts, and who dreamed.

Never, never, again
This moment, never
These slow ripples
Across smooth water,
Never again these
Clouds white and grey
In sky crystalline
Blue as the tern’s cry
Shrill in the light air
Salt from the ocean,
Sweet from flowers

Oh yes,  
‘the sun that rose this morning from the sea will never return . . .’* I have become a watcher, no longer an observer. I put my camera away last winter and now hold moments in my memory. Here I can sketch. I can have all the time I need, and more. And I knew when I began to talk to Sara I wanted beyond anything else to sketch her, to know her line by line with the pen, and later bring the texture of her into paint.

Painting is where I am now. It’s direct, mesmeric, challenging, wholly absorbing. My needles and thread only deal with our clothes, my clever printing and collaging lies dormant in my studio, a studio I rarely enter now. I have a room upstairs in the loft that is all light and sky. There’s just an easel, a table, a chair, a small bookcase, a trolley-thing of paints and brushes. Even that’s too much. I always collected things around me. I brought so much in from outside and now I’m trying, trying to have as little as possible. This is where I will paint Sara. I’m already thinking this as we take the first tentative steps towards knowing one another. Names, where we live, (we both know). Partners, family, children? I have all this, but not here, only my companion, my love who caresses me with such care and attention. There are my cats and my hens. She has no one, or rather she talks of no one. She asks the questions and avoids giving answers. She just nods and doesn’t answer. Otherwise, she’s a straight yes / no person. She doesn’t feel she has to qualify anything.

We’re standing together. We’re intent on looking at each other. Words seem a little unnecessary because what we both want to do is look. ‘I can tell you paint’, she says, ‘It’s your finger nails’. My perfect nails and the pads of my fingers hold the evidence of a morning at my easel. ‘I have seen your work’, she says, ‘One could hardly not. You’re well known beyond these shores.’ I feel myself blushing slightly. I thought blushing had stopped with the menopause, not that it troubled me much, the menopause that is. Blushing though was a torturous part of my adolescence, but let’s not go into that.

‘Your husband,’ she says, ‘he’s up very early. I see him sometimes here, on the beach.’
‘Do you get up at five?’ I am surprised. My husband gets up before five.
‘Sleep is difficult sometimes. I walk a lot. I need to be out, and walk.’

Her face, her head is larger than mine. She is a larger woman altogether, bigger *****, long-legged, but with youthful ******* that seem taut and well-rounded under her brown frock, no, her brown dress. I only think frock because that’s what he says – ‘I love that frock.’ And he means usually whatever I am wearing now that’s old and rich in memories of his hands knowing me through a dress, sorry a frock, which remains for me (and possibly for him) the most sensuous of sensations, still. Au nature has its place, and I love the rub of his skin and body hair. But when we are lovers, and we are still lovers and usually when travelling, in hotel rooms or borrowed cottages, or visiting friends and dare I say it, staying with our various children. Last autumn in Venice, in this large, amazing marble-tiled room, with this huge bed, he undressed me in front of a window opening onto our own terrace, and I was beside myself with passion, desire, oh all those wonderful things. And for months afterwards I would return to that early evening, remembering the lights coming on all over the watered city as he kissed and stroked and brushed my body through my Gudrun Sjödén frock. I would replay, find again over and over, those exquisite moments of such joyful touching as he then undressed me, and with such care and tenderness I felt myself crying out. Well, he says I did. In one of his poems (for your eyes only, he had whispered) he admits to his own celebration of those moments again, again.

Sara’s dress is calf-length. There’s nothing else. As the breeze wraps itself around the loose-fitting brown cotton her naked figure is revealed inside itself. No ring, no jewellery, nothing to hold her hair now flowing behind her. She has positioned herself so it does; flow out behind her. This is so strange. Am I dreaming this? We have become silent and together look in silence at the sea. I can hear her short breathes. She turns to me with a smile and looks straight into my eyes – and says nothing – and then walks backward a few steps – still with her warm smile – turns and walks away.

I tell him I met Sara today and ask if he sees her on the beach in the early mornings. Yes, he has, in the distance, mostly. He has said good morning to her on a few occasions, but she has smiled and said nothing. Five o’clock is far too early to say anything, he says. She swims occasionally. I keep my distance, he says with a grin.

I tell him I would like to paint her. I should, he says, You should go and ask her, do it, get it done and out of your system. It’s time you stopped being afraid of the face, the portrait, the figurative. I’d give so much to have been able to paint you, he says ruefully, my darling, my dearest. And he strokes my arm, kisses my cheek, then, he slowly and carefully kneels down beside my chair, places his arm across the top of my thighs so when I bend to kiss him his bare forearm touches the edge of my *******. He puts his head in my lap, and I caress his ears, his quite white hair.

Sara’s door is open. She’s living in Ralph’s cottage, a summer-let habitable (just) in the nearly autumn time it is. I call, ‘Sara, it’s me’, thinking she’ll recognize my voice, not wishing to say my name. She appears at the door. ‘I have the kettle on, she says, ‘I had a feeling you might be by.’ Her accent is, like mine, un-regional, carefully articulated, a Welsh tinge perhaps. There’s an uplift and a slowness in some of the vowels. ‘You will come in’, she says, more a statement than a question. It’s rather dark inside. There’s a reading lamp on, but she has the chair, her chair, close by the window. There are letters being written. There are books. Not Ralph’s, but what she has brought with her. Normally, I would be hopelessly inquisitive, but I can’t stop myself looking at her, wondering even now, in these first few moments in this dark room, how I will position her to paint her form, her face, her nature. What will I paint? I look at her still-bare feet, her large hands.

And so, with mugs of tea, Indian tea I don’t drink, but here, as her guest I do, but without milk, we sit, I on the only other chair (from the kitchen) she on the floor. And she watches me look about, and look at her.

‘I’m rather done with talking, with polite conversation. That’s why I’m here to be done with all that for a while.’
‘I came to ask you to sit for me. To let me draw you, paint you even. You can be completely quiet. I won’t say a word. I’ve never, ever asked anyone to sit for me. I’m not that sort of painter. But when I saw you on the beach it was the first thing that came into my head.’
‘I should be flattered. Though I have sat for artists before, when I was a little younger,’ surprisingly she mentions two names I know, both women. ‘I know how to be still. But, those are days in a different life.’
‘I only want to paint you in the life you have now.’ And I realise then that what I want to paint was Sara’s ‘aloneness’. I think then I have never been truly alone since he came into my life and took any loneliness I had from me. Whenever we are apart, and still there are times, he writes to me the tenderest letters, the most touching poems, he quotes his Chinese favourites down the telephone. We always, always speak to each other before bed, even when we are on different continents and time-zones. He told me I was always his last thought before sleep. And I wonder if I would be his last thought . . .

‘Do you want to do this formally?, said Sara.
‘I don’t know. Yet. I’d like to draw you first, be with you for a little while, perhaps to walk. A little while at a time. Whatever might suit you.’
‘Would you pay me? I have little money. It would be useful.’
‘Of course’, I say this directly, having no idea about what one pays a model. He will know though. He knew Paula Rego and didn’t she have a female model? I think of those large full-length figures rendered in pastels. Her model’s name was Lila, who for more than 25 years, had sat for her, stood for her, crouched for her, hour after hour and day after day. I remember a newspaper piece that went something like this: since 1985 Lila has helped to give life, in paint, and pastel, and charcoal, to the characters in Paula Rego's head. Lila was all Paula Rego’s women.

‘Sara’, I said, ‘help me please. It’s taken more than a little courage to come to see you, to ask you. My husband says I should do this, finally get myself painting the person, the face, body, not as some exercise in a life class, but the real thing.’
‘Of course’, she says, ‘Let’s go and walk to the point.’

And we did. Not saying very much at all, but I suppose I did. She made me talk and gradually I laid my life out in front of her, and not the life she would have found in those glossy monographs and catalogue introductions, and God forbid, not in those media features and interviews that I suppose have made me a name I’d always dreamed of becoming, and now could do without.

‘I suppose you have a studio’, she said suddenly, ‘Is that where you’d want me to come?’
‘Yes, I have a studio. No, I don’t think I want you to come there. Not at first anyway.’ I was floundering. ‘ I’d like to draw you, paint you possibly on the beach, where we met, so there would be sea and sky and breeze blowing your hair.’
‘And a steamer out on the horizon belching smoke from its funnel and the sea blowing white horses and dancing about. I’d be right by the seastrand with waves and spray and foam, and under a greyish sky. Not a sunny day. A breezy day. In my brown dress, sitting on the sand by the tide marks, looking out to sea, looking at the steamer away in the distance, sitting with my left hand behind me holding myself up, and the shape of my legs akimbo bent slightly under my brown dress. How would that be?’
‘Perfect’, I said.

And it was.
sky tallen  Apr 2014
to me
sky tallen Apr 2014
your hart is like a star
shining so bright
hiding behind all the light
imagene what you would be
not what you could be
makeing all the haids tern round
dont you here that soud
some peaple brack peaples harts hopes and dreems
well at least that what it seems
well what do i know im gust the girl in the back row
James Floss Mar 2019
1.  Shoot *****
2. Ski
3. Free-dive
4. Sky-dive
5. Vote Republican
6. Eat raw fish
7. Play naked volleyball
8. Eat haggis
9. Walk on coals
10. Yodel
11. Visit Somalia
12. Jell-O shots
13. Learn Klingon
14. Fish
15. Sell *****-wigs
16. Drink Genesee Creme Ale
17. Run a 5K
18. Pay mortgage
19. Divorce
20. Shoot ******
21. Go to Tupperware party
22. Drink Gatorade
23. Visit Poughkeepsie
24. Tend bar
25. Serve on a ******* trial
26. Eat glass
27. ****
28. Trump rally
29. KKK rally
30. Watch Sally Fields in The Flying Nun
31. Attend a MegaChurch
32. Listen to Death Metal
33. Watch American Dad
34. Moonwalk
35. Eat brussel sprouts
36. Watch Fox News
37. Turn 20
38. Turn 30
39. Turn 40
40. Turn 50
41. Turn 60
42. Turn over in my grave
43. Eat a tern
44. Teach Fall term
45. Terminate a solemn vow
46. Take a vow of silence
47. Disavow core beliefs
48. Operate a snow plow
49. Forget that I do know how
50. Insinuate
51. Dissemble
52. Lie, cheat and/or steal
53. S'Mores
54. Wet my bed
55. **** my thumb
56. **** a duck
57. Watch Little House on the Prairie
58. Rent a yacht
59. Not rescue animals
60. Not neuter pets
61. Not give to Food for People
62. Not appreciate Public Radio
63. Not appreciate Public Television
64. Knot like a Boy Scout
65. Play Parcheesi
66. Pay credit interest
67. Feign interest
68. Pinterest
69. Instagram
70. Eat spam
71. Exam cram
72. Karaoke
73. Jet-ski
74. Snowmobile
75. Pretend what the ******* are going on and on about matters (whoops; that’s number 67)
76. Blame my parents
77. Not take responsibility for my choices
78. Invest in oil futures
79. Renege on promises
80. Waste my time listening to telemarketers
81. Waste my time listening to zealots
82. Waste my time listening to racists
83. Waste your time
84. Waste my time, I hope
85. Not seek truth
86. Not seek answers
87. Not be authentic
88. Not be xenophobic
89. Accept lies
90. March lockstep
91. Buy the latest and greatest
92. Be consumer extraordinaire
93. Not be present
94. Not be conscientious
95. Not be good to my fellow human beings
96. Consume too much
97. Waste too much
98. Boast too much
99. Post too much
100. Not think about consequences
101. Not be me
The glamour and glistening, the perfect touch,
the sound of applause at the runway strut.
The cloths the fashion, I love it all,
my favorite past time; the shopping mall.
when I go out into the light,
my looks tern heads. oh what a plight.
This was written for a friend.
Gladys P Jun 2014
Her eyes appeared as dazzling as the sea,
When she was bathing underneath the sun,
Splashing water upon her precious face,
With her tiny hands .... laughing having fun.

She was a bundle of joy,
Playing with her adorable white furry pet,
On this beautiful sizzling summer day,
And it was quite difficult to forget.

With her little bare feet,
Covered in greenish-blue waters slightly below her knees,
As I observed,
Near the lovely tropical coconut trees.

Along the shore was a small tern,
Dressed in white with yellow legs and bill,
And a black patch above its forehead,
Dancing in happiness, as we watched in thrill.
Carlo C Gomez Oct 2021
~
Windsong breeze
Playing to the tune of migration
Flight of the Arctic tern
Pushing the boundaries
For greater hemispheres
Internal clocks sound a message though
It is indeed time to go
To wing forth in formation
As they were designed to do
Their wanderlust tempered
By an annual returning

~
Where Shelter Jul 2017
raise ourselves, rouse ourselves, rising to race up versus the sun,
to ferry dock, to catch the first, the 5:10am to the mainland,
which is just an island-too-but-longer,
on the first boat of the workweek, the first leg
of an island to island to island journey-poem, but that
for another morning, unless already writ, but forgot?

the north fork, an herb garden of vegetables and fruits,
family farms & rural suburbs, towns of English & Indian names,
all cheek to jowl, corn rows, tractor museums,
high school football victory banners of a prior year,  
and alas, always fresh, aged-woe reminders,
too many streets, ferries, bridges named for young boys who didn't return from foreign wars and whom we all knew by right sight

me, a summer sojourner, a summer visa, an off-islander,
a Hebrew, living among the native island born hareleggers,^
the Methodists, Quakers, and the rest of a varietal potpourri of "Egyptians," come here by choice, all, living in a paradisal
farmers market, all faiths enjoying seven times seven
years of plenty

Country Road (CR) 48, plainly named, snakes it way to the city,  
a  hundred miles, a hundred miles, as the song says,
to a distant, invisible emerald mecca,
which magically emanates
waves of gravitational pull powerful,
where I heard that human city folk go to do derring do,
battling with numbers, creativity and keenest human instincts,
game playing for a throne that may not even exist

as we go west, the sun sneaks up behind us
spotted in the steve sideview mirror, watching our
winking red tails,
moving away, asking us why, are we somehow dissatisfied,
with the rich purple soil of this little refuge it protects?

this soil, blessed, brings forth the babies of summer,
truly a fruited plain cornucopia, the famed potatoes,
fresh eggs, for sale by unseen and oft unattended hands,
plant it and it will come, the peonies flowers, the sod, tomatoes,
the Christmas trees, local duck and fresh caught striped bass,,
over flowing fruit stands endless,
where they debate no politics but only
which fruit will become tomorrow's pies?

and always, first and foremost, the vineyards, the vineyards

not yet six am, sun still too weak, to do the ***** work burn,
fields full of snow white mist lying over man tall vines,
the mist, ground swelling up to the chest level, then north
to the nostrils and head, intoxicating the lungs, the brain,
inculcating the chest with a salve of moisture,
a blend of sea and farm fresh air,
containing the designer's secret arts of earth creation

the fine mist so thick, no different than a snowy white out,
leaves me marveling and a-wonder, why do I leave,
dictated to by boxes on a hardware store calendar?

why not bide and hide in the morn mist,
never will-would we-be found, the vineyards and corn rows,
my protectors, the bay and sound, my natural moats,
is the music of wind + leaves, symphonic insufficient,
isn't the theater of the birds, wild turkeys, families of deer, osprey,
tern, visiting Canadian geese, and the hard to spot, Broadway stars,
those little foxes, wondrous enough?

this guising vineyard mist offers solutions to questions
I should not be asking, especially, primarily,
where is shelter,

for that is asked and answered
July 2017
for the island and the fork folk

http://definithing.com/harelegger/
SøułSurvivør Aug 2019
Her cheeks a'blooming
Fresh petals
Assuming a charm
All their own....

Flesh roses
In a flute of bone.

Her arms are strong wings
Ethereal beauty, poised
For her journey, as a
Tern is
On its long feathered flight
From the North
She wings her way

To the South
Only to meet
The arctic waste
Once more...

Yet the flesh roses never fade

For they are
frozen with tears.

Catherine Jarvis
8/19/2019
Another poem for the book. This illustration done by Sarah, who has a skilled touch & wonderful imagination.
topaz oreilly  Apr 2014
Ludlow
topaz oreilly Apr 2014
The rain always comes from Wales
and the river tern flows fast,
we're told 1066 started it all
the Castle and promulgated plantation design
the rise and  fall
time and time again.
djr Jun 2012
[Click]

"Welcome back to Story Hour on PBS. Today we have a very special guest, who’s going to read us a very special story. Do you kids know anything about Greek Mythology? No? Well, you’re gonna learn some today. Everyone… say “Hello” to Bill."
“Hiiii Billlll”
“Now, children… he can’t hear you…”
“HIIII BILLL–”



Hear the voice of the Bard!
Who Present, Past, & Future sees;
I am the Dean
of Cosmic Beans
That grow to poetrees

Then every man will ever clime
to he that sits upon
atop this rhyme
this mythic vine
Dwells the giant Albion

The giant of the sees,
his jealousea and fierce
bid him to seize
an Odyssey
assisted by a Circe

Circe, in play, did then, inturn
the shipsmen of his Highness
and with a Feast
did tern to beasts
not one of them a tygress

As Circe distracted with the beasts
Did Albion then turn
He stole the Fleece
from Circe’s niece
and left it to the terns

The terns, in turn, interned at sea
did little to digress
flew fleece of ram
into the hands
of swift and mighty Tigris

From Milton’s tale of sim’lar tree
that of Eve and Adam
With fearful sea
and symmetree
The Tyger ate The Lamb

“The Tiger ate the Lamb?”
(crying)


[Click]

— The End —