For Tanka Tuesday Poetry Challenge No. 67, Yellow Things, Colleen has invited us to write syllabic poetry using things that are yellow! Try to use at least two yellow things in your poem. Try NOT to use the word yellow. Instead, use the yellow thing as your metaphor to tell us the colour.
Photo: taken north of Jindalee – looking east over the Great Victoria Desert, one of the driest places in Western Australia.
Dust
Summer lines my mouth with forest ash, a reminder of other lives. Blackboard monitor taste, ghostly white, dusting off; chalk lines for handball with all the attendant double entendre, same as marbles, there’s no escaping the language we develop around giggles and hands over mouths with whispers out of harms way.
Later came sighs like the tongues of angels but by then we had traversed life’s mountain and returned below the humid clouds to the ordinary dryness.
Will the rains come, will they turn the chalk to milky sludge. Will I traverse that mountain again. The earth is dusty, thirsty ….
But I worry that the rains will wash away my memories to the ocean where all memories are held.Will the ocean whisper them back to me?
Looking out the window losing myself in the effect of breeze on shrubs, on the distant waves all galloping in, we call these wind riven waves white horses, feeling the deep summer warmth listening to small birds sipping wine, talking the day waiting for the five o'clock ducks who will ascend from the river and barely clear the roof, why leave the river at night and where is the grass greener at night?
Can a day be like the sweetest nashi the juiciest strawberry, dreamy unencumbered no thought to expectations, can a day be like the glass of a still river the glide grace of a pelican In flight a day when the kookaburra laughed without derision, that moment we buttered heaven, tasted joy and gave little thought to tomorrow.
parallax 