(From last year. Not my favorite, but it was enjoyable to write.)
Set apart from millions
a world crafted of eons
stretching into eternity,
a single spark among infinity.
Glittering in the deep
this waking world never sleeps.
Ever-dreaming, ever-living,
around a sun ever-burning.
A planet filled with smoke and scars,
listen, listen to the silence of the stars.
Throughout Scandinavian shores there are statues called ‘the Fisherman’s Wife.’ They show a woman reaching her hand out to the horizon, in honor of all the fishermen lost at sea, as well as honoring the wive’s whom they left behind. This poem is based on the statue I saw in Norway.
She stood alone at water’s edge,
holding strong her lifetime pledge.
‘Til death do us part’ were the words,
echoing round her head.
The clouds were low and water wild,
winter winds reviled.
Out of sight, out of sound,
Based off a recent expedition to Norway, where I spent time in Jotunheimen (which literally means ‘home of the giants’ in Norwegian) and I was inspired to write something about the endlessness of that place. I know why it is named what it is.
Far beyond the dusty hills of Gjendesheim,
beyond the endless shores of the Northern Sea,
there lies a place, touched by the hands of eternity.
They called it Jotunheimen,
named for those who dwell within the expanse,
Oh dreamer,
the world wants to see your
soul.
Your burning heart,
your tangled ideas,
your iridescent hope,
and
sharp-as-blade sorrows.
The world needs
them.
A bit of randomness I wrote from the prompt of ‘one room’.
Everything exploded in a kaleidoscope of red and orange, and the next thing I knew I was standing in a completely white room with no doors or windows, and I hadn’t the slightest idea how I got there.
Across the pallid grey of dusky dim
that lays upon the shattered seas;
beyond the skyline’s golden rim
that scintillates the western breeze,
there lays a hidden, lonely shore
long left to ancient myth and lore.
A silent coast, a desolate strand
an unremembered sylvan land.
An excerpt of my in-progress fantasy novel, a sketch of the history of the highlands in my world.
It was a land of stone and heather, of misty moors and rocky slopes lost to the archives of indomitable time. Mist lay upon the murky meres, shaped by cold winds into the fluttering cloths of ghostly robes. A few raucous birds disturbed the water with their wings, sending ripples wrinkling along the surface as they skimmed across the face of the lake. Roe deer grazed near the shores, blending with the grasses so that they were nearly invisible but for the twitching of their white-tipped tails, while in the brush rustled a pine marten or mountain hare, searching for food. No footsteps marked the damp soil. No smoke rose in the distance. A strange silence lay upon those highlands, a silence made inscrutable by the roving mists and voiceless heather. Barred from civilization as it was, bordered by the trees of the forest, this place was cut off from the world as much as if it had been locked in a cage of iron. Few traveled there, few set eyes upon its expanse, and few hazarded the endlessness of it for fear of never returning. The highlands were left to the silence of the sun, an unmapped wilderness carved from the beating rains and howling winds of the north.
How far we reach,
stretching our wings to the sky,
testing the limits of
impossibility.
Diving deeper
and deeper
into the farthest recesses of the cosmos.
When you were sad and the world seemed without hope, I offered you a handful of stars freshly picked from the fields of the sky. You put them in a glass bottle and displayed them on the windowsill where the sun could shine through and set them glittering like a thousand diamonds risen from the sea.
The infamous captain Edward Thatch, more commonly known by his illustrative pseudonym ‘Blackbeard’, stood on the rolling deck of the Mary Celeste in the proud stance of one who clearly knew he was being regarded with complete and utter awe, not to mention fear. It was difficult not to stare, for he stood there like a dark phantasm wreathed in mantles of arcane smoke. Fuses were tied in his abundant black beard, sending up grey clouds and shrouding his face until all that could be seen of his features were two fierce eyes glittering beneath his hat. Those eyes were terrible to behold. One might call them devilish, or unholy, or even diabolical, for they glowed with such light I felt shivers run down my back and strange tinglings at the base of my skull, as if I were staring at an apparition which should not have been glimpsed by mortal eyes, for he almost did not appear human. A raiment of stolen red silks flowed around his imposing form, fluttering ostentatiously at the hand of an obedient wind no doubt beckoned for that very purpose. Over his shoulders he wore a brace of three pistols, and in his hand glinted the keen edge of a curved cutlass, the notable weapon of a pirate.
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