A Life Betrayed

She lives the only life
she has ever known
inside someone else’s home

she wonders how she came to this
miles of fields and distance
a breeze touching her
now frail being

did someone leave her here
without her knowing and
will she wake one day
to find she’s dreaming

for she loved him so in her way
but was he a mirage or
just a ruse she wrote of
in her own knowing

before her body did betray
and stole her life
and youth

© 2017, Renee Espriu (Renee Just Turtle Flight and Inspiration, Imagination & Creativity with Wings, Haibun, AR, Haiku & Haiga)

..the flight to egypt..

Edwin Longsden Long RA was an English genre, history, and portrait painter.

**

there are many pictures at this house, two dimensional and more. how can I love one

child above another?

I had only one, so that was easy, then questioned if I loved the late arrival more, I said no just different.

so I talk out loud instead of writing .

a new prose. I talk of formative years, the safe place.

russell coates museum. have you been there? it was free on thursdays a haven from the rain,

the

pain.

indoor fish pond, quiet on the stairs, to the edwin long gallery. the flight to egypt. looking

back now, I never thought of it religious. immense it covered the wall.

I use the past tense, yet it is still in place.

on googling I see the topic is biblical, I remember the procession, the faces, the space as

if his meaning was hidden to me.

now by choice it is.

do I make such pictures? no.

weird stuff as if installed in a museum.

crying.

© 2017, Sonja Benskin Mesher  (Sonja Benskin Mesher, RCA and Sonja’s Drawings)

in Iris Murdoch

the characters for the most part
get themselves into such a muddle
usually intent on mirroring
the messes & muddles of others
closely observed by scheming clowns
with special peculiar insights

how will they get out of the muddle?
a question which keeps you entranced
turning the pages rapidly
never really wanting an unravelling

no linearity just sets of closed circles
of rather bizarre impossibility

occasionally a character will experience
a bright moment of illumination
or clarity which I have come to call
the specificity of the ordinary:
the cat on the terrace dust particles
lizard on a sunny bank
bare gritty floorboards leaves in the wind
ivy climbing on a rock as it might be
to refer it all to myself measuring
the impact of the ordinary

if only the characters had listened
to their author’s commentary
more carefully they might all have been
able to rescue themselves

© 2017, Colin Blundell (Colin Blundell, All and Everything)

the moses manifest

he grips the tablets in his charge, this
courier of commandmenta, and takes umbrage or looks
askance at some person or
persons on
his left. on his head
are zigguratish lumps,
horns, that should have been
unsculptable rays of
light. julius the pope, the vicar
of christ, has left
his mortal remains entombed
here, and moses to guard
them. the likeness
of julius was to be
the capstone of the tomb
but it was never
done. the militant pope
had need of his hireling
visionary elsewhere,
as plasterer and muralist
for a now-renowned chapel.
the tomb was finished in 1545,
decades after julius’s promotion
to resident of Heaven.

© 2017, Gary W. Bowers (One with Clay, Image & Text)