satyapriya

In long ago rooms,
in a suburb now crowded,
I'm told there are still echoes -
my voice singing Johnny Cash songs.
I withdrew my energy from that house,
but I go there in dreams.
Today, it's still an area
for young families,
and there's mention of a woman's voice
who sometimes sings,
and once in a while,
weeps so sadly
that even a Johnny Cash heartbreak song
would hang its head.
In long ago rooms,
I left a younger self
to continue a life
that no longer fitted.
In long ago rooms,
in dreams, I still walk the floor,
wondering how to dig myself out.


Dear Real Toads and Others:
DreamWidth makes it difficult to comment on my poems if you are not a DW member. Apologies. I am, when I can, reading your poems, even if I'm not commenting. Boy, launching a book is time-consuming!
More apologies for these poems being so late to the party. Between book, NDIS, and the short story course I'm doing, plus family, and all that jazz, well...WARGH!!!

Today's prompt, courtesy of Real Toads in Imaginary Gardens is to do with weather.

Halfway around the world,
morning becomes yesterday's afternoon,
winter to summer,
Wombat State Forest exchanged
for Stonehenge in rain.

The women invoking Earth, Air and Fire:
serious, focussed, full of intent
to make this a peak holy experience.
Aussies all, chilled in the English dawn,
that we can't see anyway
because grey cloud lets down grey rain
onto grey bluestone,
brown ground.
I laugh, a crazy woman
for I am the Water quarter,
and it invokes me
down my neck,
into my boots,
inside my glasses,
a torrent cheerfully washing me clean
of any illusions that I am in charge.
"Water, well, here it is!" I shout,
to the disgust of all
who have come for this moment
inside the stone circle.
They stretch their senses to the limits
to feel whatever the sarsens have for them,
while I bend at the waist
(creating a waterfall off my rain-hat)
and lick the nearest standing stone.
It tastes of moss and the past.


Thankyou to anyone who is reading this poem. I didn't realise how difficult DreamWidth made it to comment if you weren't a member. Sorry. But rest assured that I'm reading your work (inbetween madly proofing my new book of short stories, and preparing for its launch in May), if you're with Real Toads. Thanks again.

She doesn’t cook,
or clean much.
She’s vegetarian,
like her mother, and grandmother,
and back a few more generations,
at least on the maternal line.
There are cousins as fat as cows,
meat-eaters who even suck
the marrow out of chicken bones.
No such thing as a dessert, or a chocolate
in her regimented diet.
No bread.
Raw vegan, heavy on the vegetables.
She doesn’t know why,
except that’s how her family is.
She heard something, once,
about ovens.
Their family is small,
so maybe there’s something there,
in their background,
about Auchwitz?
She doesn’t know,
and no one says.
She thinks that one day,
She’ll join Ancestry dot com
and find out.
She keeps that idea to herself,
in a cage,
occasionally testing it to see if it’s ready.
It never is.
Oh, and she hates her middle name, too.
So European, so peasant.
It sits there, in the centre,
like a damp wood on a cold night.
Gretel.
She wishes it was something lighter,
maybe something magical,
something sweet,
like a confection she could live in.
She eats a piece of fruit,
the only sugar to pass her lips.