The Poetry of Earth is Never Dead
© 2012 Loren Zemlicka
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Alone I stare into the frost’s white face.
It’s going nowhere, and I—from nowhere.
Everything ironed flat, pleated without a wrinkle:
Miraculous, the breathing plain.
Meanwhile the sun squints at this starched poverty—
The squint itself consoled, at ease . . .
The ten-fold forest almost the same . . .
And snow crunches in the eyes, innocent, like clean bread.
- Osip Mandelstam, “Alone I Stare Into the Frost’s White Face”
This Hour of Awe
© 2012 Loren Zemlicka
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5 AM. One-quarter past.
Distant chimes inform me this.
A bell peal knells the mist.
And sunlight’s
not yet bludgeoning.
But some light gets blood going.
Last night it was snowing
and now
every path’s a pall.
Though mine the only footfalls
at this hour of awe. Above
hangs a canopy of needle leaf.
Below, the season’s
mean deceit—
that everything stays
white and clean.
It doesn’t, of course,
but I wish it. My prayers
are green with this intent,
imploring winter wrens
to trill and begging scuttling bucks
come back.
There’s something that I lack.
A wryneck
bullet-beaks a branch.
His woodworm didn’t have a chance.
What I miss,
I’ve never had.
But I am not a ghost.
I am a guest.
And life is thirst,
at best.
So do not strike me, Heart.
I am, too, tinder.
I’m flammable
as birch bark, even damp.
Blue spruce, bee-eater—
be sweeter to me.
Let larksong shudder
to its January wheeze,
but gift these hands a happiness
just once.
It is half passed.
And I am cold.
Another peal has tolled.
I’ve told the sum of my appeals.
I need not watch for fox.
They do not congregate at dawn.
But I would,
were I one.
- Jill Alexander Essbaum, “Would-Land”
2012 Weekly Challenge: Old Fashioned
© 2012 Loren Zemlicka
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When I do count the clock that tells the time,
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;
When I behold the violet past prime,
And sable curls all silver’d o’er with white;
When lofty trees I see barren of leaves
Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,
And summer’s green all girded up in sheaves
Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard,
Then of thy beauty do I question make,
That thou among the wastes of time must go,
Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake
And die as fast as they see others grow;
And nothing ‘gainst Time’s scythe can make defence
Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.
- William Sakespeare, “Sonnet XII”
2012 Weekly Challenge: Modern
© 2012 Loren Zemlicka
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For this challenge, I wanted to photograph nature in the style of a “modern” artist. I used Jackson Pollock’s “Gray No. 14″ as inspiration.
“Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn’t have any beginning or any end. He didn’t mean it as a compliment, but it was.”
- Jackson Pollock
Grieve Not
Via Flickr:
© 2012 Loren Zemlicka
Grieve not that winter masks the yet quick earth,
Nor still that summer walks the hills no more;
That fickle spring has doffed the plaid she wore
To swathe herself in napkins till rebirth.
These buddings, flowerings, are nothing worth;
This ermine cloud stretched firm across the lakes
Will presently be shattered into flakes;
Then, starveling world, be subject to my mirth.
I know that faithful swift mortality
Subscribes to nothing longer than a day;
All beauty signals imminent decay;
And painted wreckage cumbers land and sea.
I laugh to hear a sniveling wise one say,
“Some winnowed self escapes this reckless way.”
- Walter Clyde Curry, "Grieve Not"
SOPA – Blackout the Supporters
© 2012 Loren Zemlicka <—- Irony
Anti SOPA wallpaper listing corporate SOPA sponsors.
Please download and use as you see fit.
2012 Weekly Challenge: Colors
Via Flickr:
© 2012 Loren Zemlicka
Why do CDs reflect rainbow colors?
"Yesterday I got lost in the circus
Felling like such a mess
Now I’m down I’m just hanging on the corner
I can’t help but reminisce
When you’re gone all the colors fade
When you’re gone no New Year’s Day parade
You’re gone
Colors seem to fade
Your mama called she said that you’re down stairs crying
Feeling like such a mess
Yeah I hear you you’re in the background bawling
What happened to your sweet summertime dress
I know we all, we all got our faults
We get locked in our vaults and we stay
But when you’re gone all the colors fade
When you’re gone no New Year’s Day parade
You’re gone
Colors seem to fade
Colors seem to fade"
- Amos Lee, "Colors"
