Brilliance of a deep blue sky
Whipped about on high
Mare's tails in their latticed way
Spray across my sky.
Wind aloft and rising
In its wild mercurial fling
Driving cavalcades of galloping
White mares to offering....
A magnificence on high
In a quotative display,
Stampeding into vastness,
To illuminate my day.

M@Foxglove.Taranaki.NZ

Vastness on high
In a troposphere of sky
Delicately blazed
And so intricately phased.

This cavalcade of cirrus
With a slash of errant wind.....
Then, behold, with bravado,
To let the stampede begin.

A clash of hooves at gallop
Across a turquoise sky,
Joins the thunder of the passing,
With the scream of equine cry.

There's Mare's Tails in the Heavens,
In a symphony of song
And the Gods roar embellishment
At the righting of all wrong!

M@Foxglove.Taranaki.NZ

In a few months, I would become a mother
myself. Drove to her home, eager to spend
the day with my own mother. Tried to ignore
the deepening crevices in her face, arthritic

knuckles that still pounded dough to make
dumplings for others. Late afternoon, we perched
upon her kitchen stools, sipped chrysanthemum tea.
Her voice was quiet as she recalled leaving her dear mother

decades ago, toddler on hip, for a new life overseas. An unspoken goodbye that shimmered like silk between them. Sorrow distorted her face, the words strangled in her throat: Lao Lao, your grandma, had shuffled from room to room, stunned into silence, the roar of this impending

distance already drowning out my pleas for her to somehow understand. I was leaving her, perhaps forever. Her fingers had trembled as she gifted me a parcel containing two homemade qipao dresses and three tiny outfits for you –
a toddler who would grow up without ever knowing her grandma.

I watched my mom as she sat in her kitchen, shoulders slumped.
I could see how this loss broke something in her.  Still, I made
no move to embrace her. Apathy bloomed in my folded arms
and shifty eyes, a feeble attempt to shield myself

from her palpable pain. Didn’t realize that I would be steeped in it
a mere few months later. Didn’t quite know then how to measure the distance between these wounded souls spinning out, unsure
of which direction was ‘home’ and unable to turn back.

In this tale of three mothers, I now see the steadfast thread
of Your handiwork stitching together burdened hearts
spanning seas, lands, the spaces between. It was Your grace
that carried us — and only with You, did we each learn surrender.

For so many reasons;
When the wow creativity
Of the young, new baby poets,

Bursts all over me,
Making me question
My egotistical perception,
Not a slap, but a belly laugh!
At the old fool, who once thought
Ever so secondary briefly, momentarily,
Unofficially, of his own esteemed self-worth,
Only to be reminded, deaf~dumb & blind~sided
By the fresh air, the aggravating sight of new insight
The delicious!delight  of reading the whole of all night
The explorations, the baby hallucinations, the trembling,
Insights of the explorers of the old, not re!newed, but, but.
Made anew, re~viewed with perspectives boldly unknown,
With crazy wisdom to expound, here, you! right here, right now,
I leave you and return to delight, taste, new extra languages, that
                                               I must
                                         learn not to speak
                                       but to peak, even to
                                     Cry, Laugh even Smile  
    
                              In all my new native tongues



Friday, July 18
5:39 AM,
2025
In the sunroom

Dictated in one fell swoop, not a moment to lose, dispatched while
Still laughing at myself...

In place of shadows
sunspots and creases
an embankment the gray of day seizes
      nailed to peril as a savior
      pushes out all traces in its labor

Dust and smoke
--the heartless void
above the faded ring of hope
      say a sated prayer
      for your fellow wayfarer

I'll shield your body between
the rays and surface
I'll be your dark clouded step
     when your own feet fail to purchase
     into the ground they sink

The home where Chella grew up, in the ghetto of Liberty City Florida, had beige carpets so old that pieces of the tuft and twirl would come out of the backing under-foot.
The  apartment window shades were white floral plastic rectangles cut from an old shower curtain.
She shared a bedroom with two younger siblings and the overhead lights were naked light bulbs.

she grew up in the a noisome ghetto of Liberty City Florida
she never knew her dad
she won’t talk about her mom
she hated the flaw of things
nothing worked, not the dishwasher
or the air conditioner they couldn't afford to run.
There was no wi-fi for the no computer
Her mother worked two or sometimes three part-time jobs
They added rice to hamburger-helper to stretch it.
Maybe you got a pair of shoes for Christmas and chicken, not turkey.
They were poor, used clothes poor, food assistance poor, third world poor.
She got a used bike once, for Christmas. It was stolen.
At 14, she babysat for months to get a Rihanna mini-backpack.
It was stolen.
But they lived 2.5 miles from the beach.
It was a 53 minute walk. She couldn't afford the bus.
She knew not to hitchhike.
She kept a knife in her right front jeans pocket.
She studied at school or at the beach
She practically lived at the beach
Her wardrobe was a one-piece swimsuit under cut-off jean-shorts and flip flops.
What friends she had were at the beach.

A wino, who couldn't really talk, looked out for her at the beach because she once gave him a dollar.
One night he pulled a knife on a **** who was bothering her. The police came and took his knife.
“I’m SO sorry,” she told him, “I’ll get you another one,” but he mumbled in his incomprehensible way, and waving the idea off, he shuffled over to a garbage can, and leaned it up to reveal eight other knives under it.

We were looking at some of our high school pictures together and we realized that my designer, high-school freshman prom-dress that I bought with my allowance ($6,000, on sale, with no fitting) cost more than her mom’s car.
.
.
A mini playlist for this:
Baxter (These Are My Friends) by Fred again.. & Baxter Dury
Runaway by Slick Rick
Redemption Song by Mitchell Brunings
Breakout by Swing Out Sister
.
.
Our cast:
Chella - A tall, lithe black girl, from Liberty City (Miami) Florida with a ‘Bachelor of Science in Global Affairs’ from Yale University who is currently a Harvard Master's candidate.  She had it rough growing up - she was buying skin-care at Trader Joes! I'm showing her some things.
Your author, a simple trust-fund baby from Athens, Georgia with a Bachelor of Science in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale, currently a Harvard Master's candidate.