One Single Impression: A Winter's Day

This week's prompt for One Single Impression is "A Winter's Day." We are having one here on this Winter Solstice day. We had about 8 inches of snow yesterday and we're having more as I type. I'm not very happy with my haiku. I couldn't seem to find my voice this morning - that and a number of distractions - mean I'm posting this quite late. The sun has come out since this morning, though, which is nice. Snow looks pretty even if there is too much of it.





The last photo and poem are about six years old and date to when I first moved back East after a difficult stay in Arizona. (If you click on the photo, you can see the curve sign. It is a very sharp curve indeed.)


CURVES IN THE ROAD

Snow like white shade on naked trees
Lakeside beauty: Cold. Clear. Still.
And I sit here angry and sad
Not knowing why I am ready - but unable - to cry
Grey kitty howls my blues for me and I scold her
She is demanding my attention
Not just to her but to myself
She is smart this old grey girl
Her twenty years of life have taught her a thing or two
More than my fifty-four have taught me, I'm afraid.
So I scowl at her instead of crying
Tell her quite unkindly to "SHUT UP!"
Then go back to what I do worst and best
Feeling restless and lost and rather sorry for myself
Outside the wind blows snow off the trees
And the twenty mile an hour curve sign
Is blurred through the glass
But makes me think that maybe there's a lesson here
I'm wanting to race past these feelings that are coming up in me
These emotional sharp curves
When what I really need to do is slow down and take heed.

~ Katherine Rabenau

One Single Impression: Distractions

This week's prompt for One Single Impression was "distractions."

I meant to write more
But so many distractions
This is all I have

Although some say no
I think distractions are good
Not always maybe
But sometimes the unplanned road
Leads to amazing wonders

~~~~~~~~~~~

I procrastinate
And few things delight me more
Than good distractions

~~~~~~~~~~~

Distraction's two-faced
It can steal needed focus
But sometimes it helps
To numb the edges of pain
So we can bear to go on

One Single Impression: Two Prompts - Welcoming and Childhood Memories

(Please scroll down for the final Gratitude post.)


This week's prompt for One Single Impression was "welcoming." I missed last week even though I really wanted to participate so I have added a response to that prompt at the bottom of this post. I warn you in advance that it is very long and gloomy. Sorry about that.

Welcoming each day

My gratitude unbounded

How awesome is life

~~~~~~~~~~~

I have slowly learned

To welcome all life offers

Not always with grace

But with a desire to trust

To find beauty in all things

~~~~~~~~~~~

This poem for last week's prompt is VERY, VERY long. I just wrote it. I have not polished it. It took two weeks and a half dozen false starts to get anything, yet I wanted very much to respond to that prompt.... so I did, just a week late. My apologies for the length and the.... darkness of it. This is what I come up with after a month of writing about gratitude. What's wrong with this picture?

Childhood memories are rare and full of pain

Part of me thinks still that I had a happy childhood

I was more fortunate than many, I know that

I had a home, a family – crazy as they were –

I had food to eat, ideas and books

I wasn’t Unloved

Just badly loved

Not out of malice or malevolence

But my parent’s own woundedness

They meant no harm

I believe that

My brother, I think, did

He loved me and hated me both

I don’t know why

Some mis-firing synapses in his brain, no doubt

Doesn’t really matter any more

Though his cruelty, his madness

Has etched itself into my bones

Scarring them with the acid of his devious hate

Sometimes he was mean, you see

But often, his malice was coated with sugar

Always it was excused, explained away

By a mother who thought she could pretend it into submission

Then there were my two fathers

The elegant, brilliant actuary and the slobbering fool

Oddly, it was the drunk Dad who I knew best

I was his caretaker

We made music together Drunk Dad and I

Those close moments at the piano

Him lurching

Tuning and retuning his mandolin

Sitting too close on the bench

Breath strange, eyes red and glazed

Those are my “happy” memories

I didn’t understand until years later

Until my 40s

How afraid I was

Didn’t understand that life on watch

Is not normal

I remember watching him make drinks

(I was server)

Chugging shots as he did

Drunk before he had his first official sip

I remember watching him at dinner

Stuporous

Take all the food onto his plate

Before my turn

My mother’s anger simmering

I remember once my mother packing all her things

“I’m leaving,” she said

But she didn’t mention me.

What about me?
I remember that as being on my birthday

Though I doubt it was

Just my psyche’s code

You are to blame

They would have been ok without you

Be good

Be very good

You must atone for existing

Oddly, aware as I was of my father drinking

Of how he got so drunk

The power of denial is so strong

It took my sister’s anger one day

“You’re drunk” she yelled

I was in my 20s.

“Aha!” my brain cried at last.

“That explains it.”

It’s not that there were no happy days

I think there were.

But I think I wasn’t there

I lived my childhood

Both hyper-vigilant and out of body

It’s how I survived

I still feel guilty

Saying all this

(And there’s so much more)

My parents were good people

How can I betray them so?
They did their best

I have no right to blame them

To be sad or hurt or lost

Even now

I don’t know what’s the truth

Was I a lucky child?
My mother said I was

And ungrateful too

Certainly compared to her

I had a golden childhood

She reminded me of that constantly

As she spilled her own grief into my child heart

I listened to her story

And felt it as my own

In therapy years later,

I realized that her memories were so vivid in me

It was like they were my own.

They are terrible memories

Brutal and harsh

My life was so much better

How can I complain?

I don’t complain really

I try not to

The bad came with much good as well

And in the end I am who I am

Because of both

My weaknesses and strengths

Emotional Siamese twins

Operating for good and ill from the same source

This is long

Unpolished

I do not speak easily of the child I was

She is lost to me and she rules me both

I am still trying to make peace with her

With them

With pain

With shame

With love and loss and confusion

So tangled together

That at 60 years I still can’t sort them out

I don’t know why I remember the bad

More than the good

I am ashamed of that

But it’s how it is.

One Single Impression: Disguise

This week's prompt for One Single Impression was "disguise." For some reason except for the last one, this week's poems are kind of dark. The first three come from the days of my youth. Don't think I have every published any of them before and I probably should have left it that way, but.... for better or worse, I'm going to share them. Guess that's it by way of apologies. Can't help myself.

One Single Impression

This week's prompt for One Single Impression was "autumn." I would have thought this would be an easy one but my muse seems to be in early hibernation. This is all I could come up with.

One Single Impression: Defenses Down

This week's prompt for One Single Impression was "defenses down." The little haiku about opening my heart came pretty quickly, but after that it was a struggle. I keep thinking I should have a lot to say about this but my brain doesn't want to offer up anything. The last one - which I just wrote this minute (as opposed to last night), might have potential but it isn't very good at the moment. I'm posting it anyway. Desperation, I guess.



Turn the other cheek
Means let your defenses down
And give peace a chance
How else is there any hope
Of ending foolish wars

Peace is what we crave
It is our natural impulse
It’s where the heart is
Until those with agendas
Trick us into shedding blood

After 9/11
There was a moment, a chance
An instant in time
When people across the globe
Reached out to hug, not to strike

After 9/11
The world was betrayed again
By mongers of fear
Using words like God and freedom
To excuse betraying both


***********


My defenses down
I open my heart to you
Trusting and afraid


***********

I went to a workshop once
And as often happens
I felt very alone
Needy
Ugly
Out of place
I was with a friend
Everyone loved her
Which made it even worse
I feel so undefended out in the world
Like a child looking for a mother
Lost
Afraid
Alone
Even in a crowd
It was a healer's gathering
Later we all took turns
Lying on the table
Opening ourselves to love
The woman who led the group
Working on me
Said
"Wow!
I'm amazed at how huge your heart is.
You seemed so closed and defended."
Ironic, isn't it?
I thought I had my defenses down
That I had none
But the world saw me armed to the teeth
If only we could learn
That fear and shame and doubt
Are defenses that close us off from what we want
And if only we could learn
To look past what people (nations) seem to be
And look into their hearts
I bet we'd be surprised
At how beautiful they really are
Wow, we'd say
Hearing your leaders
(the face nations show the world)
I thought you cold and cruel
But now I see your heart
And oh, how big it is!
Just like mine.

One Single Impression: Folly

This week's prompt for One Single Impression was "folly." Not a lot of inspiration today, just these three, the third one added late. None of them thrills me, I'm afraid.

One Single Impression: Faces

This week's prompt for One Single Impression was "faces." A hodge-podge today. Eight haiku, two tankas (my first ever). . . and an old poem that I posted back in April. I tried to make a nice collage of faces - and I did - but then I was worried that I didn't have people's permission to show their wonderfulness and I couldn't figure out a way to disguise them without making it just ugly, so... no decoration today, just words... except for Memling, down at the bottom.

How did I not see
The ugliness in your face
When I still loved you

~~~

How did I not see
The sweet kindness of your face
Until I knew you

~~~

Faceless in the grave
I wonder what your life was
Centuries ago

~~~

Why won’t you face me
Why not say what it’s about
So I can have peace

~~~

Faceless demons taunt
Their hateful words spewed at me
From inside my mind

~~~

My sister’s children
In your faces I see hers
And know she lives on

~~~

It’s not the features
That make a face beautiful
It’s the soul inside

~~~

I want to make peace
With the face in my mirror
Why does she mock me?

~~~

Face it, he intoned
You'll never amount to much
Like he'd cast a spell
I believed that lie for years
Until one day I woke up

~~~

Just seeing your face
Tells me miracles are real
I'm not your mother
But I love you like I was
Deep inside my cells and bones


I'm going to add one more. I've posted this before - back in April - but it is truly about a face, so I thought I'd share it again here, with the accompanying art that inspired it. If you are interested in the story behind it, you can check back here.


MEMLING'S PORTRAIT OF A MAN

I see your face
Staring across centuries of canvas
And I am drawn through time by your magnetism
I know I loved you once, or would have,
You look so much a part of me
With that quiet fanaticism
Maybe we were lovers in another incarnation
And it was so fine that neither of us has forgotten
In the five hundred years since you were you
And I, whoever I was then.

One Single Impression: Rest

Please scroll down for Project Black...


This week's prompt for One Single Impression was "rest." I've posted three haiku and one VERY long poem that needs polishing. I decided to post it anyway. Eeek.

Listen carefully
The rests between the notes
Add their own music

Resting my body
Is easier than my mind
Which shuns the stillness

Wrested from my arms
Most beloved companion
At rest in the arms of God

This one is very long and I just wrote it. It needs polishing, but I've decided to post it anyway, for better or worse. I don't have a scanner so the photo is pictures of pictures. The black and white is with me in about 1952 or so, the top left is holding her third (I think) grand child, and the last was on her 50th wedding anniversary. She was already quite ill at that time.

POEM FOR MY MOTHER AND MYSELF

Ah, mother
I hope you are at rest now
Shed of the dark cloak of shame and sadness
That you wore like armor against my love
I don’t know why you couldn’t see
The radiance I saw when I looked at you
But then I can’t see my own either
I learned from the best
To be unsure, ashamed, afraid
Though I know that wasn’t your intention
I realize writing this
That though I know/believe
Death has restored
The light of who you are
What I remember, what I cling to
Is the hurt and the rejection
How sad is that?
Especially since I saw beyond
I swear you radiated light some days
Even as you shunned me
Even as you judged me
Even as you pushed my love away
The first time I timidly offered the words “I love you, Mom,”
You replied – I laugh about it, though it hurts –
“I don’t mind you so much either,”
It was the best you could do.
I understand that
Your wounds were too deep for anything more
Later, when you too could say the words to others
To me you responded still
“You say it too much; I don’t believe you,”
And maybe I did
I just wanted you to know
I wanted you to see yourself
And I wanted - oh so desperately, agonizingly wanted –
You to see me also
But maybe we were too much the same
Maybe even though I wanted you to see more
(So I could see it too)
Maybe all I was able to let you see
Was the shame you heaped on me
From almost the minute I was born
So afraid you were that I’d be hurt
So afraid that I’d embarrass you
So afraid of what others thought
So afraid
So afraid
So afraid
So ashamed
So ashamed
So ashamed
I know it’s past time to put all that to rest
You are in God’s light now
Where Love is all there is
And I’m here
Clinging to your judgment
Because that’s how you gave your mortal Earth-bound love
Maybe it’s time to put that past to rest
And open my heart
To know my fat, my dusty house
Are not deal breakers In God’s eyes – or even your new Heaven’s eyes
Maybe it’s time I put that wounded you to rest
Forgave her for not loving me
Not seeing me
I still don’t know quite how
This old way of thinking and feeling
Runs deep in my bones
But here and now –
I kiss that tired old woman
Gently on the forehead
I loved that you too
Wanted to comfort and mother you
As you couldn’t mother me
But maybe it is time to let her rest
To forgive us both
For being human and afraid

Katherine E. Rabenau

One Single Impression: Myth

Please scroll down for Project Black...


This week's prompt for One Single Impression was "myth." I've been busy with project black and my birthday and lots of company and apparently my brain has decided to take a vacation. All I have been able to come up with as of 6:30 pm Sunday is the following:

Alas and alack
Inspiration comes not
I am myth-defied

I'm hoping that my brain will kick back in and if it does I'll add something more later or tomorrow. For the moment. This is all that will come out of my head. I'll bop around and visit others but think I won't add myself to Mr. Linky yet.

Monday addition: Although inspiration continues to elude me - despite reading some of the wonderful posts of others - I'll share my little pun in hopes that it amuses.

One Single Impression: Through the Window

(Please scroll down for Camera Critters)


This week's prompt for One Single Impression was "through the window." I did most of these late last night, probably not a good idea as there was a much better version of the first one which simply vanished into cyber ethers never to be seen again. I'm not as happy with my recreation as I was with the original, but that's life, I guess. Sometimes you just have to go with what you've got... something like that. I try to make the text as readable as possible, but if you have difficulty they can all be expanded by clicking on them.
















Have a lovely week. May all your windows offer pretty skies and welcome views.

One Single Impression: Doorways

This week's prompt for One Single Impression was "doorway." I'm not feeling well and I did these too quickly and impatiently. If I had better sense, I'd just wait and post them another day but I have my rules and I do OSI on Sunday so for better or worse, these are sort of badly framed and I don't like the colors and I think I had another one in my head that I have misplaced. If I remember it, I may add it later. So...

Doorway to dark side
OSI is now posted
Even though it sucks