Incantations of blood and love
Red sky at night: sailors’ delight.
Red sky at morn, sailors: take warn!
Mantras from my desert
childhood loop, recite one chorus
every time. I wonder at this
sun. Sky, reinvented.
The first time I set sail
the rudder broke.
Limp, the captain’s wheel
impotent. No second chance.
Step on a crack; break your mother’s back.
I walk carefully
measuring my pace,
syncopating beats –
a jazz jam saunter.
Wondering, if I was so
powerful I could back cast.
Cause Mama to be tossed
thirty years in the past.
A red candle is burned
every night at sunset for ten
minutes, then the candle is
extinguished. This continues
until the entire candle
has been used.
From the time I first bled
nothing made sense. For ten years.
Make that twenty. It’s important
to be able to count. Recite.
Charms and incantations
give grasp on a world.
Call it faith. Call it ritual.
Repetition improves your odds.
* * *
A strange ditty I had been thinking of anyway, trying to weave old memories into a memoir. But here they come sprouting, like fresh red leaves. Tender and bright.
A few others are seeing red today. Find them at Read Write Poem.
To see an amazing artists work, Andrea Dezsö’s “Heart-embroidery”, go here. (Do it. I’d make an illegal copy for you to wonder at, except her work is brilliant. I want to honor her.)
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This is very intriguing. I like how you weave the different elements together here.
red sky at night … step on a crack … i love these old rhymes and think it’s a great idea to intertwine them with old memories.
hi!
[...] work on some poetry, like red incantations. Two more poems in April. Then a time of sorting and [...]
Thanks for stopping by Erin!
Hi, Carolee. I’d been thinking about old rhymes a lot lately. Glad you think they work as a foil.
I, too, really love the idea of working the old ryhmes into your poetry! I thikn I remember hearing somewhere that sailors need wind, so if the sky is red, it means a windy day, not a beautiful day. I never liked that reasoning, though. I like thinking it means a beautiful, calm, sunny day!