The Women Writing

 The Women Writing

Here they are on the edge of the world 

Perhaps you see the crumbling cliff on which they sit

leaning on bent palms

coconuts waiting to drop

precarious as all existence

They are finding their voices

words coming at them from that soft clattering cadence of rattling fronds

You can imagine the azure sea glistening with sunlight on the curls of the tide 

You can see the green leaves and grey brown trunks

With the color changed to sepia as with images of old, you can barely catch the ocean breeze and fragrance of distant plumeria in the image

These women writing will not be hearing the critical voice, the telling them how to capture their audience

Those who listen will hear their authentic emotive song as the sailors once heard the sirens 

compelled to the rocks

shoals that never learned indifference 

rocks of fate upon your shore itself

#napowrimo2021

Moirai

 Moirai

A young girl is told the facts of life, given to understand the nature of the spindle, the rumination of the thread, finally, the arbitrary scissors that end it. 

In her dreams, she sees the length of thread spinning out for her, how it stretches into the endless sky, thusly quieting the deepening hole in her gut.

The randomness of fate assures her of a broad path, a trapeze of a life, swinging broadly between achievement and ruin, love and despair. 

Shifting her gaze from sad eyed lambs to children in cages, from tumors on sea turtles to arrays of flying fish breaking out of the ocean, the idea the world should make sense in her terms lays out upon the sand. All the ideas shimmer in the ocean augmented light. A wave comes, and sweeps them away. Ideas lost in the ocean.

Time rattles on like a freight train, humming on the tracks before and after the rail cars flash by. The long threads of very long lives, the short threads of those who vanish before they finished what it seems they had been meant to do, and the rest. You see the reasons with those on the ends, the careless daring before the snip, the stray illness that comes from nowhere, the elderly demise where the senses have been stilled. What then of those cuts in the middle of it all, those lives snipped off like fabric cut in the wrong place, proof of the wild nonsense that is in fact in charge of our lives.