Howling through Streets and Woods

The wind was in a ripping mood, howling

through streets and woods, making corpses

of bleeding hearts and the strongest

of dandelions. Still,

there is comfort to be found

in bones that tell magic tales,

in flesh that dares to discover

nature’s poetry in every breath,

in every voice that speaks of how

all things that live never die—

they grow differently, being
rediscovered (and beloved)
in inked memory.

the first photo was taken right before a spectacular windstorm that left the bleeding hearts plant practically naked of blooms. The second is one of the fallen (there were many) drying on my board (the others now live within the pages of books).

things have been relatively mad around these parts, and I’m a tad behind. I still didn’t want to miss Sanaa’s Weekly Scribblings #14: Let’s use Pathetic Fallacy, shall we? (write using the literary device “Pathetic Fallacy”). So, I combined Sanaa’s prompt and the Imaginary Garden with Real Toads’ prompt for April 13^th: 13 is Poetry (choose 3 to 13 (nonconsecutive) words from the quote below, and use them in a poem that is a deliberate celebration of metaphor), and birthed the poem above.

“People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in the ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.” — Diane Setterfield