Rose Fairy (WC)

(Wendy Cabell, October 19, 2021, feast day of the Inner Life of Mary (Sulpicians), of Blessed Agnes of Jesus (who conversed daily with her Guardian Angel),  Prophet Joel, the Marytrs of North America, Saint Frevisse/Frideswide (patroness of Oxford), Saint Cleopatra with her son John. Image from here.)

Rose Fairy

(after Victor Hernandez Cruz)

I knew you could hear it. 

Those sounds made by flowers 

as they stretch into the light. 

Star’s splash as swims the sky. 

Butterfly conducting her bee choir,

         “Dang they're good!”,

while Mama shooshes tiny wings,

“Now just listen”, she says, 

and you do. And

           I follow you.

   Though you don’t know.

         You who know 

            the way to 

           rose-light. 

*From prompt: Freewrite as inspired, after hearing Victor Hernandez Cruz’s Here is an Ear Hear, whose "sounds made by flowers as they stretch into the light" is incorporated above. From Lisa Freedman's BreatheReadWrite.

Autumnal (WC)

 

(Wendy Cabell, October 17, 2021. Feast day of the Deliverer Icon of the Mother of God, of Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, Prophet Hosea, Saints Cosmos and Damien, and Saint Solina of Chartres. Jewish calendar remembers the passing of Matriarch Rebecca (1553 BC) and Methuselah (2105 BC). Image from here.)

Autumnal

(upon viewing painting lining a medieval manuscript, of a woman sweeping)

being October perhaps? Then as now—simple tasks,

complex world. World that deepens about now,

      ripens. When then, 

to pick the fruit from the tree?

    When it’s sweet enough

(today’s lesson in Psycho-botany) 

Tonight’s menu to feature

           pumpkin soup.     

Tonight's memory being that moment, you

know the one, air it shifts, wee nip rides the current. 

Gentle at first, stirs a longing. For storytelling, candlelight. 

Warm scarves and hot tea. Till the quiet settles, bidden 

or no. And everything else, it can wait. As we turn—

welcome our kindly guest, 

before she’s gone. 

*From prompt: Freewrite as inspired by etymology of the word orange. From Lisa Freedman's BreatheReadWrite, October 11, 2021. This poem later revisited for revision and inclusion in letter, as part of Daisy Barrett Nash's Writers At Play, letter writing series, 2022.