Tag: Poetry

the jar of winter light

November 3, 2025

I was in the winter of my life; the folk I met along the road were my alone-born summer.

At dusk I sank into sleep with visions: myself in reckless dance, in laughter, in ruinous crying,

their faces like lanterns hauled through fog — tender torches that lit the hollows.

My memories of them kept the hearth alight; they were the only music in that long, pale house,

the only season I could name as real. When the moon leaned close I would hold each remembered hand

as if it might not vanish by dawn, and in my palms their warmth felt like a fragile law.

Once I dreamed of being a poet crowned in beauty — lines like silver on a priestess’ tongue.

Then fate, an unkind hand, scattered that kingdom: the dream cleaved and flung apart,

a thousand broken stars I kept wishing on until my fingers bled with wanting.

They glittered and hurt, each shard a small cathedral of might-have-been.

I came to learn that true freedom lives in the taking and the losing both:

to drink the whole bright cup, then see it shattered at your feet, and stand unbowed.

So now I walk beneath leafless trees, the year’s last birds gone, my breath a slow pale bell,

and treasure what remains — the fierce soft company of memory, the hard, sweet light of having loved.

in moonstones and opals

November 2, 2025

An aura of moonstone, 

a ghostly pale gleam,

Her eyes like opals, 

lost in a silent dream.

Luna skies are saying, 

with stories untold,

And starry constellations, 

like legends of old.

Coral reefs shimmer, 

in heavens so vast,

A jasmine perfume, 

from a sorrowful past.

A halo of white, 

in the silvery air,

Shimmery waters, 

reflecting despair.

Beneath the celestial night, 

shadows creep slow,

Where remnants of heartache 

forever will flow.

A haunting reminder, 

of love turned to dust,

In moonstone and opals,

And all turned to dust 

we have always been here

October 22, 2025

Smoke finds the lamp and wraps in a shawl of grey,

fingers of dusk knitting around a tired flame.

It tastes the hulls of ships that sank before language,

licking names from timbers, learning the salt of silence.

We have always been here, keeping time in a jar —

murmurs caught like moths, wings powdered with memory.

The lid is a moon; sometimes it rattles with old storms,

sometimes it lets a slow breath of midnight escape.

Outside, the ocean writes a new coastline in foam,

an eraser hand tracing and untracing the shore.

Waves fold secrets into kelp and bone, then tuck them away;

the horizon redraws itself with each indifferent tide.

In the lamplight, the shawl shivers, revealing small stars

stitched into the grey where burnt paper once lay.

Smoke remembers the taste of bell and rope and prayer,

and how, beneath language, the deep keeps its own ledger.

the lighthouse

October 20, 2025

Beneath a moon that forgets its name, the cliff hums —

a low, sea-bone lullaby where gulls have no eyes.

The lighthouse stands like a tooth in the throat of night,

its glass mouth breathing fog into a world that misremembers.

Mist unspools from the island like old fishing nets,

tangled with the rubbed-out footprints of the vanished.

Wind scrawls hieroglyphs across the masonry; the stones

answer in the language of small, obstinate echoes.

Inside the lamp a slow heartbeat keeps vigil,

not of brass or flame but of something stitched from midnight.

Sometimes it opens like an eye and shows the ocean

as a ledger of memories— names ledgered and crossed out.

Boats arrive with no captains, their ropes knotted with silence.

They carry trunks of unsent letters and teeth that still count,

they carry mirrors that reflect yesterday’s weather,

and children who speak the weather’s secret names.

On certain tides the cliff exhales a chapel of bells:

salt-wet bells toll for anniversaries that never happened.

Shadows leave the lighthouse at dawn to seek their owners,

and sometimes come back changed, carrying seaweed in their mouths.

There are rooms in the tower where clocks grow mold and melt,

where maps redraw themselves into constellations of regret.

A portrait of a woman who never lived leans toward the stairs,

and if you touch her frame a tide will answer you in vowless speech.

The keepers — if keepers can be called those who keep absence —

polish the lens with hands that leave behind small, slow constellations.

They read aloud from weathered books, hymns no one taught them,

and sometimes the words bloom into gulls that forget how to fly.

At the edge the fog arranges its crooked altar,

placing objects it finds on the pews of the cliff: a child’s shoe,

a broken compass that points toward what someone once wished for.

The island listens, and in the listening the sea writes its will.

Late, when the lamp opens like a mouth to swallow the dark,

the lighthouse names the lost with a light that trembles.

Each name becomes a ripple, a small comet of salt,

and the mist, like a patient audience, applauds in silence.

If you come alone, do not ask the stones for directions.

If you listen, do not answer the wind when he asks your age.

The island remembers everything it never owned,

and the lighthouse keeps turning its slow, patient eye.

Here, time forgets to be straight. Here, ghosts sleep in earthen jars,

and the moon sometimes arrives in a boat, barefoot, humming.

Stay only long enough to learn the lighthouse’s true trade:

it does not guide ships home — it teaches them how to forget.

the portrait

October 19, 2025

The portrait hangs where dust gathers slow,

In corridor twilight, half-lit and low—

A face unblinking behind glass that breathes

With the hush of curtains and the hush of eaves.

Eyes like wells of varnished night,

Mirrors that swallow candlelight,

They keep the hours between two ticks,

Counting secrets in the floorboards’ ticks.

The frame remembers hands gone cold,

Carved with names the tongue won’t hold;

Paint peels like memory from bone,

A smile stitched to a windless moan.

At midnight the wallpaper leans and listens,

The house inhales and darkness christens

Each footstep into softer air,

Each whisper braided with its stare.

Sometimes the portrait tilts its head

When rooms declare the living dead;

Sometimes a lock of painted hair

Unthreads itself into the stair.

It knows the rhythm of abandoned clocks,

The lullaby of shuttered knocks,

It knows the shape of absence well—

A hollow where a heart once fell.

If you pass beneath that patient gaze,

Feel how the past loops through its maze;

The portrait keeps the house awake,

Breeding echoes no dawn can break.

Listen: the hush becomes a sound—

A breath, a name, a hollowed ground—

And in that frame, forever sealed,

A ghost keeps vigil, unrevealed.

Morning mist

October 17, 2025

The air, a breath of autumn’s chilling grace,

A whisper crisp, across the morning’s face.

I walked within the fog, a ghostly shroud,

Where earth met sky, and sight was disallowed.

The mist, a river woven in the air,

I swam through dreams, where silence held its prayer.

Each step a hush, upon the dampened ground,

No other soul within this realm was found.

The trees emerged, like phantoms in the haze,

Their branches bare, from summer’s golden days.

A sense of loss, within the vapor clung,

As nature’s mournful melody was sung.

And in that space, where reality seemed frail,

I felt the touch of autumn’s haunting veil.

A lonely beauty, in the misty gleam,

Adrift within an ethereal, waking dream.

Morning walk

October 15, 2025

The morning moves like a memory,

air thinning into a brittle hymn —

autumn sharpening its breath

into silver teeth.

I walk through a river of fog,

each step swallowed by damp velvet,

worlds folding inward like pages;

my heartbeat muddled, buoyed.

Leaves, hushed as drowned birds,

etch dark maps on the wet ground.

A distant rooster sounds like a clock

ticked under water.

My coat gathers ghosts of the mist;

each exhalation dissolves

into something that remembers

how to be alone.

Between the trees, a pale light

bleeds like an old secret,

and for a long slow moment

the world is neither gone nor here.

moonstone and opals

October 13, 2025

Moonstone and opals—an argent breath at dusk,

Aura of moonstone, cold and quietly brusque.

Eyes like opals, depth turning shadows to song,

Luna skies unravel, long and opaline, long.

Starry constellations hang like corals in the night,

Silent reefs of silver that lick at the light.

A jasmine hush drifts from hedgerows half-seen,

Sweet as a memory, sharp as what’s been.

White joy, a pale lantern trembling on the shore,

Shimmering waters keep secrets and more.

They answer in ripples, in echoes undone—

The moon and the jasmine and nowhere to run.

leather soft

October 10, 2025

Leather soft as a forgotten palm,

coffee-ring islands on a page,

tickets folded like small promises.

I catalogue the lean delights:

a pastry’s burnished edge,

the exact angle of a streetlight,

the laugh of a stranger I never named.

Years will lengthen into rooms,

thin light sliding down the walls.

I gather these small weights — ink, paper, taste —

to build a harbour before the tide.

When the days stretch slow and pale,

I will open this stitched geography

and find whole atlases in the margins,

little fires kept alive with my hand.

upon the breeze

October 8, 2025

Upon the breeze, a tiny frame,

wings still, a fading, gilded name.

Sweet nectar’s longing, tongue outstretched,

a final sip, a world detached.

Within frail petals, softly laid,

a garden vigil, gently swayed.

The sun descends, a crimson stain,

earth claims her own, in soft, sweet rain.