Pictures around home

Our creek.

Peas, taller than I am, tipping the trellis over.

This is our giant mock orange bush–at least 15-plus feet tall.

Posted in photography | 7 Comments

monochrome

too dull for daylight
rain muddles everything gray
puddles for splashing

Posted in haiku | 4 Comments

synthesis

these images we carry
if they were to transfigure
from dreams to mouths

lift from paper
to something tangible

like word made flesh
transmutation

the streets would shimmer
with littered, glittering worlds
not words we would read
and nod our heads

but poetry we could
scoop up
and carry in our pockets
like marbles

to play with
or simply relish
how it rolls and dazzles
in our open palms

Posted in New Free Verse | Tagged , , | 12 Comments

a quiet man

I remember more what my father did
than anything he said; how when I was small
he would fill the kitchen with his dress uniform
and lift me high in his arms, so up I felt tall;
but then, the uniform would be put on again later
and he would leave, my mom said
to teach soldiers how to fight;
this pattern repeating until the day
he came home, folded the uniform
and never wore it again
and he no longer belonged to the army
but just us, his gentle eyes and large hands
always finding and fixing in comfortable silence.

***for Father’s Day coming up–NOT this week, lol–thought I would share some of my very earliest memories of my dad.

Posted in New Free Verse | Tagged , , , , | 21 Comments

Fizzy Feelings and Fuzzy Physics 3: Motion (1)

By Noel Ihebuzor and Susan Daniels

Three balls dancing in space
in place lace us to the larger cosmic circles
of perpetual motion

The blue pearl spins on its toes
in never stopping rolls like a top
held in space in distant but constant hug
by the sun radiating
surges of magnetic and force fields

Locked in predictable patterns
but always surprising us;
the times of sunset known
but not its colors,
the exact flush and spectrum flash of sky
as the axis spins and shifts it to night colors

Rotating and revolving
centrifugal and centripetal discourses
neatly balanced as ordained though slightly inching
imperceptible

Our mother an eye, soft and smiling
a constant blue gaze unblinking,
but kind, a glowing awareness
logical in her turning;
her light beguiles and seduces
in its soft sparkling
as the moon, her hills, and blue seas
use their pulls in equations
to twirl, whirl, and swirl

Caressing and awakening the sleeping ocean
stirring, causes waves, tides, and surges
three balls hanging apart in space, moving
yet linked by invisible forces flowing from them
and causing motions and emotions to rise and ebb

And you and I, also
feel the pull, the irresistible forces
that draw our blood beneath skin,
that grasp our hands to lift and turn us
so we also spin and dance like these,
hoping that our weaker movement  too
will birth waves
and pools 

***Once again thoroughly enjoyed braiding lines with my physics lab partner, Noel, whose beautiful voice shines here 🙂

Noel’s voice is bolded, mine italicized.

Posted in Duets with Noel Ihebuzor, New Free Verse, Space | Tagged , , | 8 Comments

HH: Ordinary

fleeting sweet pleasure
cone weeps slow vanilla tears
ordinary joy

Posted in haiku | Tagged , , | 39 Comments

The New Columbuses

no lands left here
to penetrate with flagpoles
fluttering colorful claims,
simply tilled fields

but still people
to displace and devalue
in a new imperialism

these explorers and exploiters
using maps of genome
to target areas of trade and conquest
do not claim ownership of soil

but what is buried
and grows within it

how does one patent life
and claim sole ownership?

***Thank you Jeremy for the post that triggered these lines.

Posted in New Free Verse | Tagged , , , | 20 Comments