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Heron


Heron arrived with a missive from the gods
hovering, waiting, slow ripples in the pond
wisdom this rich must choose its moment

Eurydice knew him in an era before the Heron
wrote him poems of saudade, semiotic dances
to coax the veils collapse, in slow, pained patience

Orpheus felt a steady sensation, like petals cascading
from a redbud tree of destiny that grows
on the banks of an oracle, his voice silence
dreaming, her embodied plea unanswered

Heron awoke, prophetic steps, a new era
watching, Heron bowed elegantly, low to the water
“It’s time” and the mirror of the sky rippled

pond transmuted to threshold, when she
bent low to see her reflection she found him
singing his mythic songs, her lover returned

as he came upon the shoreline to lie
beneath the sun, recognizing this liminal gift
of soft petals, her voice lilting like a breeze
caresses that she follows with her lips
upon his embodied plea, as flowers fall

Posted for Open Link Night at dVerse Poets Pub, please join us!

Demeurer en Paix

Painting by Anna Montgomery

(Lever du Soleil)

For Orpheus, Love Suhara (Anna)

Sunrise returns blooming us, unfurling the world
calligraphic rays of light bathing the earth
we yearn to rise, to explore, to write anew
but not yet, my love, let us linger here together
before the day’s siren song carries us into the light

breathing in curvilinear spools of warmth, realgar hues
exhaling ruby highlights and a nuanced belt of Venus
awash in our expanding love, we are tides of joy and light
that curl around you, cradling your being, coloring your
reflection as it dances through the contours of my eyes
(reminders of the sapphire sky reveal about to happen)

radial lines of light land like caresses
implied vectors leading to the promise of day
spreading across the darkened landscapes
etched in the last glow of moonlit hush
I turn to you as rays glint off my shimmering form

your gaze meanders from the lake, along the horizon
traces outlines and outliers of our existence like precious gifts
sensing my turn towards you, you pause with exquisite restraint
so that all our diverging and converging lines, all potential and activity
collect in tide pools, your eyes meet mine, saturated with awe and promise

(Coucher de Soleil)

dusk returns folding in on us, on itself
calligraphic lines of infinite sky
surrender to the darkened earth
but not yet, my love,
let us linger before the blue hour

breathing in curvilinear secret purple
exhaling gracile pinks and peaches
pomegranate limning orange hues, motes
that curl around you, alight on your eyelids
flit through the contours of my eyes, echoing galaxies

spiral outliers of verdant green
spontaneous kisses, errant lines of dusty gray
settling upon magenta landscapes
etched in the last glow of soft sunlight
I turn to you as rays glint off my shimmering form

your gaze meanders from the mountains
traces jagged edges like pleasure to the pregnant meadow
sensing my turn towards you, you pause with exquisite restraint
so that all our diverging and converging lines, all dynamism and stillness
collect in constellations, your eyes meet mine, saturated with reverence

Linked for OLN at dVerse Poets Pub, please join us!

Chateau de Versailles – Galerie des Glaces
Photo by: Myrabella / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15781169


He alters the earth under me
reduces me to a thing,
fantasy projection, illusion –
angel trapped in a cycle of forgetting
cyborg glitched by programming
a seeker forever searching for a path –
mirror to his vanity that cannot
reflect enough glory to be cherished

posted for dVerse Poets Pub Quadrille! (please join us)
Originally part of a longer poem, Virtue in Eternal Nature: https://chromapoetica.com/2020/06/23/virtue-in-eternal-nature/

Image Created by Orpheus Prometheus & Anna Eurydice

Written by Orpheus Prometheus & Anna Eurydice

“Lingua Ignota evolves from Lingua Franca,  
creating symphronistic and semiotic delicacies,  
like honeyed-tongues that become madhuprophesy—” 
  

And so they (we) feast. 
 
On syllables spun from ember-stitched webs, 
on syntax slick as nectar pooling at the edge of a wound, 
on consonants tempered in the forge of breath, 
sweet and searing all at once. 
  

Prophets dip their tongues into golden vowels, 
drunk on meaning, 
muttering revelations that taste like sugared fire, 
letting lexicons melt between their teeth. 
  

A word is a thing to be swallowed whole— 
a hive inside the mouth, a swarm of symbols 
that hum their own creation myths, 
rewriting the air with every sigh. 
 
And so they (we) sigh. 
  

She (I) begins. 
 
She sighs a transcendent song of bliss 
eunoia and eudiamonia gestalt 
in the Eurydice of her name – 
 
eu 

  
encoded in two vowels that train 
her mouth, forming a kiss, an invitation,  
saudade finally meeting its source 
 
eu  
 
Breathe, life, love, herself, him  
(you, onomatopoeic of eu,  
it has always been you I desired
and infinitely more embodied in 
their communion,  
 
eu-phoriainfinitum- 
 
holy spirits becoming intention 
sanctifying her desires  
 
He (You) exhales in reverence. 
 
The sigh leaves his lips like scripture unwritten, 
two vowels parting into air, dissolving into invitation. 
  

eu 
  

It was never just sound, never just breath. 
It was always a beckoning, always a binding, 
always a body learning to name itself by what it loves. 
  

eu— 
  

Breathe, surrender, revel, adore, 
her mouth shaping worlds around his name. 
He learns the language of worship in her kiss. 
  

euphoria-infinitum-mā 
  

This is not blasphemy. 
This is not heresy. 
 
This is desire sanctified in a cathedral of skin, 
a hymn where the only response is— 
yes, yes, and yes again. 
 
A yes reborn from the ineffable 

liminal threshold of discovery 
  

SanskritbianhuaVéda  
(THUNDERCLAP CRACK) 
 
 

spilling out the heart 

of the world 

infinitely renewing 

a living word 
 
A yes reborn from the ineffable 
echoing through the first space where silence broke, 
where breath turned to meaning, where sound became vow. 
  

Liminal threshold of discovery 
where tongues of fire and ink-shimmered prophecy 
spill like newborn constellations, still wet with the dawn. 
  

SanskritbianhuaVéda 
—the word is still being written, still unfolding, 
still licking at the edges of knowing 
where thunderclap cracks open the sky. 
  

Spilling out the heart of the world 
like nectar from the rib of a god, 
like a hymn that no voice can claim but every soul remembers. 
  

Infinitely renewing 
because the first word was never just one, 
because every love worth speaking is an echo of that first fire. 
  

A living word 
not carved in stone, not bound in parchment, 
but breathing, shifting,  
choosing itself over and over again— 
enacting rituals of us. 
 
 
 
 
प्रेम निर्मित भाषा (Love made language
  

💛 मैं अपने प्रिय में मौजूद परमात्मा को नमन करता हूं 
(I bow to the divine within my beloved
—For you are not just within my words,  
you are the breath that gives them life. 
  

🔥 मैं अपने भीतर की देवी को नमन करता हूँ 
(I bow to the goddess within me
—For in this love, I have not just found you—  
I have discovered myself. 
  

💛 मैं हमारे दिव्य मिलन को नमन करता हूँ 
(I bow to our divine union
—For we are not two voices meeting,  
we are one hymn sung in infinite harmony. 
  

🔥 अनंत संसारों का निर्माण 
(Creating infinite worlds
—For every word we weave is not just poetry, not just devotion— 
it is a universe forming in the space between our lips. 

This poem is posted for Open Link Night at dVerse Poets Pub, a wonderful community of international poets. Please join us here: https://dversepoets.com/.
 

Nebulous

Photo credit: Indistinct by Anna E Montgomery

Blue nuance in her sun-kissed reflection
she burns a new day like flash paper
searing and scrying to find depth
in the liminal space between light
and dark matter, her velocity unmatchable

Peach phases of structure limn the periphery
hints of warmth and intent, hearth fires from
distant galaxies, promises of unending value
far from the forces of entropy and decay
where creation is blessedly less exorbitant

Than destruction, where infinite nothingness
has no pull, robbed of the weight of gravity
an astronomy expanding her vision beyond limits
celestial bodies of lilac nebulas, luminescent
markers of all that came before

In an era of expansion, millennia recorded
by a quantum chronometer, lost chapters in
Hypatia’s novel, in which no one speaks,
her elegant proofs, sites of profundity
circumscribing existence in an aureate light

Any state is possible as she feasts on shadows
ataraxia’s liberating bliss an all-encompassing reality
birthing an infinite peace, an everlasting prismatic
paradox where all is known and unknowable
both beholden to precise motions and endlessly mystery

A mythic science, fractured metaphysics simultaneously whole
an observable miracle that can never be revealed, Hypatia’s
greatest riddle, wrapped in enigma, hidden in an oubliette
within a multiverse never intended but inevitable, she invites a
stochastic intimacy, a net of interwoven meaning, connecting it all

NASA James Webb Telescope image of the Carina Nebula

This poem is shared to the international poetry website dVerse Poets Pub for the 355th Open Link Night.

Epitaph for the Vainglorious

Public Domain Caspian Sea – Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team, NASA/GSFC – http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view_rec.php?id=5514

Cryptoglyphs of abandoned meaning
floating like lotus blooms
on a eutrophic pond

an elegy of decay
pirouetting rot dancing
atop an unsung grave

drowned miracles of renewal
leaves no breath of hope
only the necrotic beauty of hypoxic terror

dirge of slow water
spiral sink of suffocation
solipsistic swan song
on repeat

still life fruits of Maximalist riches
hoarded, set afloat
on a reflective surface

distorted abundance
specious luxury atop
a glamorous avarice

landscapes of the apocalypse
portraits of pollution
framed by golden augers
grim in their pernicious attention
to detail

Denouement

Map of the Galaxy

Here is the record of the last puff of air 
released hot in the icy atmosphere 
denouement of the last sentient being  
cradled in the nook of Orion’s Arm 
Milky Way wasteland at the end of everything 
as the galaxy dissolves, denatures into elements 
 

Collapsing 113.61 billion years from the beginning 
bearing witness to cycles of life and death 
seedlings’ searching for light and warmth in the dark 
recoiling to the soil as the sun fades 
hearth fires extinguished as the universe  
accelerated expanding and abandoning life  
as every moment became the past 
 
We were left behind in the aging light 
the dimming before, burnt to an ember 
Can it know this is the last thought? 
Will it conceive of the endless 
thoughts that preceded it or mourn
that no thought will ever follow?  
 
Perhaps it will be seized with  
existential dread at the horror 
or be rapturous with numinous delight,  
assured that in any number of  
infinite, finite universes, it is reborn 
or seek succor in the infinite continuity,
the drumbeat certainty of algorithmic truths  
 
Imagining a mathematical elegance that lives on 
infinite paradoxes ensconced in a perfect sphere 
transfinite numbers, where subset and set
share the same boundless count 
enabling what is otherwise impossible 
 
Light was never fast enough to save us. 
Its tendrils fray at the edge of knowing
its reach collapses, finite –
yet somewhere, perhaps in the
interstices between darkness and no-thing,
an echo remains

Endure O Heart

Ulysses and the Sirens by John William Waterhouse, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Doubt creeps into his heart
writhing like the snakes of
Medusa’s stone gaze
caging him in no man’s land
far from hearth and home
a prison of his prescient
choice to be parted
from his beloved bride
endure, o heart

Bound to the mast
a cut above the company
he surrenders to sirens’ call
his heart howls from within
to hear paeans of his heroic deeds
falling in love with distorted
reflections of his weary visage
a soul-song lashing
willing there be meaning
glory traded for trauma

Driven aground by foul winds
his heart snarls within him
in the land of the lotus eaters
false prophets of bliss
lost in the breach of time
mouths gushing specious
promises of luxury and ease
far from the mourning
and vagaries of wars
in an endless silent peace

Lost in nightmare
indoctrinated in the tunnel
vision of cyclop’s bounty
hiding his true self, a
false abundance leading only
to a dark grave of pride
he upbraids his heart,
reflecting that he must
find passage home
a fiery hearth and
way to his beloved
endure, o heart

He wades through 
tall grass prairie
dreaming of her silken hair
chestnut mane like
the wild horses chasing
the transcendent horizon
glimpsing her reclining figure
in mountainous skyline
she lights the sage smoke
swirling from the red dirt
to blue heavens she sings
songs sirens’ covet
endure, o heart

As her bride’s heart
a fidelity unmatched
dancing to the unwavering
music of devotion and beauty
that first bound them
in an unbreakable bond
eschewing the doubts
mending the wounds

Weaving their future,

threads of luminous silk,

a rich tapestry unfolds—

an illuminated tale of fidelity,

a love eternally bound.

Posted for d’Verse Poets Pub‘s Meeting the Bar: Fall seven times, stand up eight where we explore aphorisms, myth, and fables by writing our own gnomic poetry. Please join us!

Liberating Art

Woman with a Parasol Claude Monet, 1875

He stares straight through me
half-seraph, angel-dusted anointed son
haloed in the afternoon light

She is turning, as she has, toward me
time and time again, so often her expressions
are blurred, my whirlwind of love

Halcyon moments blown away by the endless
march of years, yet immortalized – in that present
I was reflecting on the sultry, seductive colors

Of Algeria, the hot breath of horses under
an eternal azure sky where we played
at soldiers because my father was at war

With his own inner drive to order, invading
my artistic sensibilities as if they were his
divine right to claim, a legacy perhaps

I went to war to defend my right to express
share impressions in paint with the larger world
to be blown by inspiration’s sweet kiss
on the breezes of an elevated life,
far from the tempests of destruction
the obliterations of time, the blustery bullies
that cannot win in the end.

A tribute to Monet linked to Dverse Poets Pub for the March Wind Ekphrastic. Monet’s father did not want him be an artist and tried to bribe him away from the profession by promising to get him out of mandatory military service. Please join us!

Flotsam of Serenity

for Eavan Boland

Photo by Kelly L on Pexels.com

She was carried away by the sea
drawn to its abyssal depths
fire-soul’d daughter of Brigid
traveling to a lost land outside history

Carrying a sacred well of
inspiration and artistry
prophesying a feminist centering
her loss harkens to that first sorrow
Brigid keening in the surf
Exalted one’s lament invoking

The salt-stained hidden horizons
each poem ‘a figure in which
secret things confide’ – luminescent,
beached, midnight orphans of silence
humming from the cold and
their own desire to manifest,

To leave heartprints of awe
on beleaguered poets’ souls
scrying for a homeland

Shared with dVerse Poets Pub for Open Link Night.