Sunday, November 29, 2009

Good Medicine


You dose out good medicine

As potent as a gust of laughter
unstoppable in a burst of joy,

As calming as palms pressing down unannounced
loosening the weight of my shoulders,

As hopeful as the moment of introduction
of your baby girl into my arms,

As the easing into rest
while you spread blankets over my bed,

As a wicked master of a chocolate slave
who uses it in unspeakable ways,

As a sister who sees my weakness
and a parent who puts it right,

As part woman, part male,
yin and yang:

Life shakes us,
the lines blur between us,
we've blended beyond oil and water,
into the spaces between what matters...

with your unique medicine.

Saturday, November 28, 2009

To the Point


To the Point

Fog obscures horizon, drawing close the stone arches in surf
-accept struggle for what it is

Ocean waves crash in a sinkhole, splashing like a creature in a vast bathtub
-take joy in the unexpected

Rocky coves precede a rare virgin beach
-love without attachment

A big boulder cupcake
-fill to satiation

Peaks of petrified pilings
-peaceful

Cracked columns form castles
-contentment

Arched caves of symmetrical repeating doorways
-offer compassion for all living things

Confetti flowered hazel hills
-in afterglow

Leave bare skin exposed on paper to the mountain’s clouds
-cool fever burned hands
-
-
(photo by Jillian Standish)

Thursday, November 26, 2009

Flash 55 Friday, early


Cries of terror : "The play structure’s burning down!" In runs the 10-year-old with a magnifying glass.
"CALL 911!”
Two-story high rooftop flames touch 100-year-old pine grove.
Youngest on the phone, 3 times: “........NO! IT’S A PLAY STRUCTURE!"
Three hoses douse it out.
Chief calls in: "Yep, it WAS a ‘playhouse’."

-




Friday 55 Flash Fiction is brought to you by G-man (Mr Knowitall). The idea is you write a story in exactly 55 words. If you want to take part pop over and let G-man know when you've posted your 55.

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Moon desire or humor


Crescent Moon Cowboy Poem

Haven’t slept good
since the last moon’s rind
grabbed Venus and I,
unawares, from behind.

Nobody gets
everything I see,
but that horseshoe sure kicked
the feet out from under me.

By the time I’m done cryin’
without you black and blue,
in a fortnight I’ll forget,
by then, you’ll be “new”.

Whoever said absence makes
the heart grow fonder
never felt your bow
shoot their world wide asunder.

-
(This moonrise was taken at Mineral King, backpacking at 9,000 feet, with the setting sun's "alpine glow" on the mountains

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

My Giving Tree


Only a tree

“I am certain”, the tree said,”you only loved my fruit, and mistook your love of the sweet juice for a love of me”.


-Oh but you only bear your fruit in the fall. I also love your tall, broad canopy from beneath which I picked the fruit.

-Of course those fruit started out as tiny blooms, full of color to blind the sun, and flowing with scents to swim in.

-Or then there are your soft, luminous leaves, glinting in the sun, dancing in the wind, cooling my brow in the stifling blanket of summer.

-Only know that I also love your branches, familiar to my childhood swinging, naked and bare in winter, opening new views to the horizon, uncluttered by old litter.

-Oddly the rough and tough bark, rippled and chiseled, I also love, for its uniqueness and protective tortoise-shell-strength.

-Oblivious to your aging, I admire your anchored roots gripping the ground more deeply each day.

-Obliquely I look at other trees, and recall these things I love about you, my tree.


-
(in homage to the author of the Giving Tree, by Shel Silverstein, and the early Christmas references I am seeing in poetry blogs, see The Walking Man)
Photo by Christine McGuire, Bristlecone Pine Tree, California, the oldest living thing we see with the naked eye....

Monday, November 23, 2009


Looking at light


Crystal Refraction:

All points wear prismacolor.

Immutable sun!

Sunday, November 22, 2009

Another Fall


fall proverb:
“day=night"
"dark=light"

change comes
short of choices.

birds leave
fainter voices.

leaves fade
letting go.

leaking rain
is wafting close.

arctic lives
are turning white.

terns cry
from season’s flight.

fired sky
harvests light.

aging sun
has harnessed night.

memory seeps
an alkaline musk.

fruit feasts
in fatted dusk.

fried and dried
equinox:

preserving thou and I
in dust.


-

-Since we all can't resist a fall poem! Happy feasting this week in U.S. on Thanksgiving....

Saturday, November 21, 2009

Love


Why call it falling?

Roller coaster dream stumbling

down your well of sighs!
-
-
have a great weekend!
All rights reserved
Dianne Gross-Giese

Friday, November 20, 2009

Flash 55 Friday


Flash 55 Friday!


Like blades of grass under the blanket
upon which your mind reclines with a poem:
like pulling a guitar string to elevate the pitch
higher to match your scalding fever:
like Carmen’s tango dip,

trusting her partner’s thrusting arm
bridging the vulnerable arch of her back:

Bend, do not break.


For flash 55 friday instructions, visit g-man's blog
All rights reserved
Dianne Gross-Giese

Thursday, November 19, 2009

for friends


Here's a happy one for my friends' birthdays:


Walking to the Buckeye


just a puppy runnin’ circles in a race
read this grin bustin’ wide across my face
sweat is drippin’ down my back and chest and neck
a voice is singin’ somewhere in my head
pungent flowers blowin’ by upon the wind
hills are callin’ to continue with the climb
can’t stop searchin’ the horizon for the view
hikin’this path seein’ it brand-new

can’t ache for wantin’ another minute more

I keep wonderin’ have I been this way before?
Walking to the buckeye,
strangest thing you’ve ever seen,
Though it's almost winter,
it’s full of fruit, and bare of green.
They say it’s too acidic, inedible and tart.
Well these aren’t tears of sadness,
must be the buckeye touched my heart.
-
Dianne Gross-Giese 10-2008 copywrite
All rights reserved

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Getting over the flu


Ever have the strangest dream, that made you feel it was real, ? somewhere?


Lovers in dumpsters
Escape detection. Awake!
Before they smell us!
All rights reserved
Dianne Gross-Giese

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

earth mother?


every day I am amazed at the intrinsic role I have created as chief snuggler, back-scratcher and horn of plenty.........


Question arose today: does this blog constitute "publishing a piece"?


Happy breakfast, lunch and dinner today!


The devil is in the details

These sticky layers of cold waxy gunk
coat everything they touch
and never pull apart without a fight.
Do you want some bacon today?

I make the offer, holding a paper towel on an empty plate.
O.K. the boys break from wrestling
with less attention than if passing
a penny on a sidewalk.

I turn to the black cast iron
awaiting a transformation of opaque glue
into translucent liquid salt,
coveted by generations to flavor meats, grits and beans.

I object to its evil, artery–clogging properties,
but my sons’ cravings feed their brains a powerful fuel.
Fighting the urge to finish poems on the laptop
and answer the damp laundry’s bell,

I anticipate the perfect texture, worthy of “Elvis’s “
fried peanut butter and banana sandwich,
brown as stained leather, just a shade from black,
I will give them “God in the details…”

Monday, November 16, 2009

Winter's green sustains life


Green Leaves

Green leaves creep
Beneath thatched winter
Memories.

Sunday, November 15, 2009

Overwhelmed




Take time, find a moment to pause, today the sacred cat of the Egyptians is my angel:


Rescued

I like to think it takes an angel.
I like to think it takes an archangel.
I like to think it takes an archangel named Michael
who defeated Lucifer
and rescued the lost with Courage,

To bring me, one more day,
back to the choice to Desire.

It took a
demanding lap-dance
from a half-grown
monkey-faced
stubby-tale
curled up kitten,

And I am saved

Saturday, November 14, 2009

Melody Evolution


I cannot write poetry without listening to new singer-songwriters, Joni Mitchell is one of my favorites. One new to me is Linsay Tomasic. To all musicians:
Melody Evolution

The audience arrives,

Fluttering from spot to spot, or

Readily planted and sinking in.

Settle the mind, smooth the edges,

And tamp time into the moment.

Wait and watch:

The tools and candor of the musicians.

The artists dig and cull

Tease and tune a fertile sound.

We absorb initial notesPeel open comprehension

Feel the roots spread as

The riff weaves its pattern.

The listeners reach out – out –out

As tiny tendrils leaning towards light,

UntilWe find

A synthesis

Of harmony

Blooming inside

Of each and all

When the

Bud

Opens.

Friday, November 13, 2009

Dating again


Tonight is a rare date between my husband and I, married 23 years, I will carry the anticipation like a cat's-tail tickling me all day....


A Taste of Youth
Transported on the wake of a dream
Into lost, cool twilights of summer
A girl’s first taste of foreign lips:
Watery and fresh.
Novel then,
Now universal.
First drink from the “O” of his lips
A spring-water taste,
Clean and quenching.
Any anxious permit to share
With each boy after
Recalled his flavor.
This girl tasted a silvery droplet,
Barely enough for a drink,
Surely not enough for a cup.
Tonight she found the pool
fed by ancient isolated streams.
At the merging of rivulets
she found his flavor again.

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Remembering the Veterans and active enlisted with a heavy heart yesterday and today. My motto daily is, do it, for life is too short not to. "LITSNT"

The Place in the Shade Mother’s Day 5-10-08 DGG

Looking for a place in the shade,
we pile out of the cars
into the hazy, flat, noon sunlight.

I scan for our place among the confetti
of families dappling the grassy fields,
with bunches of children, umbrellas, chairs and blankets.

Between the flowers we search,
measuring a pace
across a stone-cobbled path,
Where the trees are sparsely scattered.

“They must be here.”
as we gaze,
Suddenly someone familiar appears:
A grandfather, a grandmother, an uncle, a cousin, a spouse, a youth:

Robert Lasher, senior: only familiar
grandfather who passed in old age
Cecil Lasher: grandmother
and first matriarch to pass from my memory
Robert Lasher, junior: first uncle
who passed in senior years
Dennis Casey: first cousin to pass
in young adulthood
Dennis Turner, the first cousin’s spouse
lost in middle adulthood
And his son, Mark Turner: first of the great-grandchildren
to be lost in great despair.

We absently calculate
dates from the start to the end
to find the difference of their lives…

while the last matriarch
patiently
leafs through the decades
to tell us
of their sums.

We leave with a matriarch
of the next generation,
and we have seen the place with the shade.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Every day a sunset keeps me hopeful and a sunrise settles me into life.

Horizons Expanding

The razor of light
Slices the strident uncut grass

Revealing an emerald settee
Under the draping grape horizon,

Where deer nuzzle between the
Fuzzy shoulders of the earth.

The blood red brush
Flashes colors to life.

My muscles drive
Under the arching trees

To save my soaring heart
From the expanding horizon.

Good morning to the best sunrise, out my kitchen window. A gift of winter, for the sunrises were formerly missed for their early arrival and northern alignment in the summer.

Cold Hills

Grey hills fade away
Cold noon sun withholds color
Hearths lie smoldering.

Happy scribing!

Monday, November 9, 2009

Glad to be alive

Today is the first day I have felt alive after the flu, 4 days of : sicker than the dead.
I wrote this poem in response to the over use of the word glad in email exchanges with a friend:

Don’t Glad-spam My Email 7-21-08 DGG

"Glad", what kind of word is that?
Unlike it's rhyming antonyms,
Mad Bad Had Sad,
It's a watered-down, skim-milk, transparent-wrap word.
It's like a label put on a card,
A yellow plastic smiley face sticker: “Have a Glad Day!”
It's not even enough to have a double meaning
in our elaborate over-embellished world.
Take “Gay” for instance, charged with joyful glee or homosexual culture.
If it had a double meaning, it's only innuendo
is the increment above ennui
for a 50's housewife stereotype
seeking something to cling to
for freshness from television commercials.
I prefer, if I use it at all, to make it an acronym,
Grateful Loving Attentive Dianne.
G. L. A. D. is a lot harder to write though.

Sunday, November 8, 2009

Here I am with my first blogspace and I don't know what to do with it!
The inspiration for my space name Rhythm of the Light is this poem,

The Rhythm of the Light 4-24-08

The rhythm of the light
rolls away, rolls away.

An orange orb bounces
on the road, on the road

Signaling the way to begin
or end the day, end the day.

The strain of my feet
chips away, chips away.

My heart heats up a blanket
which drags down, drags down,

While the rhythm of the light
rolls away, rolls away.

Skin’s cold dark drink
renews my speed renews my speed

In center of the road,
tempting pumas, tempting pumas.

Trees are hiding frogs
croaking song, croaking song

and merge with humming crickets
strumming beats, strumming beats

To Night’s rolling blackness
Infinite, infinite:

The rhythm of the light
rolls away, rolls away.

Have a wonderful wintery week.