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noble delights …

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Though you were worn and blistered from rummaging for truth and meaning, still you searched for parables. You disinterred rhapsodies. You fractured the dictionary freeing every word for your odyssey. The dove’s lamenting spoke to you of ancient stories. The gusty wind taught you grammar. Dancing phonemes tantalized your ears and tickled your throat.

Finally, you found meaning neatly nestled between language and myth. You razed the walls that bound your soul and deftly breached the rubble with poetry. Celebrate the noble delights. Yours for your victory. Ours for the love of your lines.

“He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.” George Sand, (1804-1876), French novelist and memoirist, The Haunted Pool (1851)

© 2015, prose poem, Jamie Dedes, All rights reserved; Photo courtesy of morgueFile

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Morning Comes Gently

IMG_4491Sleep moves with visions of events to come
and with stories and poems I’ve yet to write –
with gardens I dream to plant and songs
that never sang themselves before

Sometimes I meet myself in different incarnations
child, youth, young mother, wizened crone

 Then morning comes gently 

in soft refrains

“Rise and Shine”

The freshness of daybreak peeks in through blinds
Breezes stroke the shears with familiar affection
Ears spark to the rhythm of the rain on the roof or
the prattle of birds in trees and on telephone wires

I hear the bell at St. Joe’s … I wonder ~
then realize I’m no longer a schoolgirl
From someplace in time comes the baby’s murmur,
but that gift is grown and gone now
I reach for the man and with relief remember
he’s another woman’s Sisyphean task
The cat, I move to pull her languid plumpness
into the cuddle of my arms but her dust
sits in a wooden box on my night table

Slowly now

slowly

I orient to time and place

The good Yesterday is stored in mothballs
The bright Tomorrow is a hope chest

Today has arrived

nature’s reset button

I rise and do shine in the spirit of my several selves
I stretch and yawn my way into this emerging
What unimagined adventures will come  
with this new sun and newer me? 

© 2015, poem and photograph, Jamie Dedes, All rights reserved

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The Stone Creek

file0001381132763no rain that summer
no clouds for the sun to part like veils

the stoney bed of the creek so dry,
we walked on it, finding the tiny skeletons
of wild things – a deer mouse, a fish head

a heat deranged cat visited, brown and scraggy,
beaming her anger from yellow eyes,
her maw quirky and dry
her tongue gone mad

© 2013, poem , Jamie Dedes, All rights reserved; Photo courtesy of morgueFile

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if dreams die . . .

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for two friends … you know who you are …

“Hold fast to dreams,
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird,
That cannot fly.”

Langston Hughes (1902-1967), American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright and columnist

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© 2014, illustration, Jamie Dedes, All rights reserved