Songbirds

Nightingales
illuminate night
with their song
while moths dance,
enchanted by star-bright notes
which fill the darkness.


Thanks go to Tess for a black and white image on the Mag,  entitled Ponytail, by Last Extra, in which I endeavoured to instill a little colour, if not music, for this simple shadorma - an unrhymed verse form of 3/5/3/3/7/5 syllables.

But then I looked again at the original photo
and decided to have another go at a smoke related offering, even though I have never had a cigarette in all my life, I can see it as a metaphor for love that's gone up in smoke!
But I did need to look at it the other way up...

Smokescreen

A fag end of a day;
black thoughts curl away
and leave charred
remains. It's hard
when love goes wrong
and its song
drifts
in wisps
of smoke which leave
eyes stinging. We've
come to a point where it
makes sense to quit...
but they don't make patches
which match
love's affliction;
a different addiction.

Dandelions

Life force
from gold petals
spawns fairy-clock seeds
in clusters, waiting for a waft
of wind.

Perhaps
some flower whorls
are harvested instead
by a maker of wine-heady
liquid...

Its taste
will please the tongue,
but maybe not the head.
If taken to excess, beware
it's strength!

Cinquains to tell it like it is for Tess at the Mag 169, where she featured Lighthouse Dandelions by Jamie Wyeth from which I took this snippet for inspiration.

Sci Fi

Fantasy
from another world;
distant sun.

The photo by Togan Gokbakar which Tess chose for her Mag 168 sent me off on an artistic trip! LOL. Thanks, Tess!

Violets

Kim, with Real Toad's mini Sunday prompt shot me back to my earliest days, and thanks to an eBay photo, I've even been able to show you the kind of thing that caught my attention, in my Aunty's bedroom way back when...

A flower decked flask prompted me
to ask " Auntie Glad, what's in there?"
and she placed it in my hands, saying
 " Pull out the stopper, and see.
But take care!" 

Around it, bands of green and brown
topped painted flowers and leaves,
and I opened it and breathed in the scent
of Devon Violets for the first time.
I wished it had been mine!  But from that day,
the perfume and colour found its way into my soul.

Unfinished

Voyage of Discovery

Bare bones lightning sketch,
tree branch arms;
face in focus.

Sky eats hair,
devours softer beauty,
leaves stark silhouette unsexed.

Result?

Uncomfortable wake of abandonment
follows artist on imagination's ocean
as her ship sails.

When I saw this Mary Cassatt's painting which Tess chose for her Mag 167 I was  overwhelmed by a sense of 'something not quite real' - possibly created in part by the title.  If it had been called 'Le Spectre de la Rose' after the ballet by that name, it would have caused me no problem. But 'Young Woman Picking The Fruit Of Knowledge'? That disturbed me. Hence my strange, not-quite-real-non-poem, poem for today.