In that former innocence
a second sun bloomed
in my heart, and I
tucked dreams
and hopes
within my small fist
a moth within-
I held it
tense,
in careful regard.
Sometimes
I would tear, slightly
a ghostly wing
having
no space
in a hand to
move:
I shook or would
startle.
And so I began
when it was night
and I could hear the
urgency silenced
day-to-day
to still squirrel away
each fold of brain, the
tender stomach
delicate bones of a toe/
all beneath my pillow
where I would remember
whenever
I could rest
and today, there
I hold my hand
in sleep, reaching
feeling
something
alive
in my hands.
Author: Stephanie McManus
Poetry described as whimsical, daring and perceptive: my writing tends to reflect on life experience and human nature. I come from a humanist point-of-view with influences from non-theistic Christian and Buddhist philosophy.
http://ehlersdanloscontemplations.wordpress.com/ - a support to others living with chronic illness and Ehlers-danlos Syndrome.
Thank you for stopping by.
long arms
When I remember
slips
and pauses, down often. What, love? Ghosts? Palms to face, hold the baby bird | my heart one old one new my
father’s smile and the waves | laughter I hold pure and threatening.
A heart is full, dark cry knifed in the throat crawling, the bark of trees I cannot stop putting a palm upon, there a suspicion of beauty is kept. A person can become inevitable-
fresh snow, long arms I hold them around the powder cold.
erasure, the little prince condensed
A seed blown from no-one knew where,
a new flower in the shelter of her green chamber
dressed herself slowly with four thorns:
“Let the tigers come with their claws,”
she said, on the verge of naïve untruth.
Her inseparable grace
filled my heart with pity/
the little prince believed
he would never want to return,
“Goodbye,” he said to the flower
{who} made no answer but,
“I am a flower.”
The secret was revealed abruptly
far from his rose when
he arrived on our planet,
a sheep eats anything it finds in reach
and the flowers believe
their thorns terrible weapons,
‘is the warfare between the sheep
and the flowers unimportant,’ he demanded?
all the little prince’s stars darkened
choked by his sobbing,
rarely a mountain changes position,
an ocean empties itself of waters,
but, the flower is in danger
of speedy disappearance.”
My flower is ephemeral,”
said the little prince to me
and went away thinking
of the sheep back home
he’d left tied to a small post.
Walking for a time upon a road
led to a garden all abloom with roses;
they all looked like his flower/
the universe obliged to pretend
a flower, unique in all the world
was a common rose.
He continued on,
climbing a high mountain
to see the whole planet
at one glance
sharpened like needles.
“Who are you?,” asked the little prince.
“I am all alone,” answered
the pointed echo.
A fox found him some time later
sitting near an apple tree
who wanted only to be tamed:
the fox said, “Listen.
Be very patient and observe
the proper rites too often neglected,
sit in the grass and say nothing
for words are misunderstandings,
and sit a little closer every day . . .
“The little prince drew near the fox,
a fox like one thousand other foxes
so that they could become unique
in all the world to each other.
“One only understands the things
one tames,” said the fox.
And the little prince thought of the baobobs
specifically the catastrophe of them
being trees as big as castles
like the heart is seized
with the desire to awaken
and bores clear through with roots
being too small, like the planet
of the baobobs, splits in pieces.
And though he had found friendship
he still thought of a single rose
on a planet he no longer
knew a way back to.
Though the stars are beautiful
because of a flower
that cannot be seen
though a desert beautiful
that somewhere
it hides a well,
though, a sheep is in a box
in his drawings for her,
still the little prince yearned;
all-the-while true that all
stars in the sky were
now abloom, thinking her
on any one of them…
to those who do not know,
confidence in the snake,
a little lonely in the desert,
can carry a person further
than a ship. The little prince
understood this very well
when thinking of his flower.
The story of the little prince ended
when he said to me, “I am going home,”
rushing headlong into an abyss.
“My star can be found above where
I came to the earth. Just like it is
with a flower that lives on a star
that all the stars are abloom for me,
my star will be somewhere there,
and you alone will have stars
that laugh,” he told me,
to be content to have been known.
There is nothing more fragile
on all the earth than
the little prince with
eyes closed,
him extinguished by a wind,
a weathervane the wind
has forgotten.
Men raise five thousand roses
and do not find what they are looking for
in one single rose like him and I,
and do not wonder,
has the sheep eaten a flower.
Erasure of, The Little Prince by Antoine de-Saint Exupery
-for my most beloved friend, John Zajac.
skipping stones 