Day 26 - Celebrate NPM17 with Green, Leach, Smith, and Copeland!

Shadows of Dark

We grow accustomed to the dark

Truth hidden in lies

Falsehoods covered by shadows

Only light can save you

Illuminate you from unheard truths that stain

But instead

We hold on the dark

There’s safety there and disdain

A place where one can only see

What is allowed

What parts of you that steps out from the shadows, still covered

We carry the darkness like backpacks

Piling books upon books in stacks

We bury the dark within our souls

Darkness becomes us

The story we’ve told and tell

A million times over

The memories stay stagnant

In that darkness

However painful, but

There’s a comfort …. There

There’s a comfort in knowing

The heaviness is ours to bear

To bury

Or to hold

And we survived.

© 2016 Tyeastia Green                                  

Minneapolis, Minnesota  

Tyeastia Green (photo provided)

* * *

Waiting

Tonight I turned the TV off

to poke around my ribcage

at the sparrow lying there.

Did it move? Is it dead?

Or is some tiny spark inside

still dancing with desire,

its tattered wings just waiting

to fly out of this dark cloud?

© 2016 Dan Leach                             

Kearney, Nebraska 

Dan Leach (photo provided)

* * *

Butterfly

Thick busy animal tail hair

Untamed wild, rare.

Follicles speaks

yesterdays’ tweets.

Battling combs, eyes that frown, judge

strands cannot budge.

Hair distorted

is contorted.

Cut like felled trees, hair dots the floor.

Mighty no more.

Her, alive, new

shining like dew.

© 2016 Phylise Smith                        

Pomona, California

Phylise Smith (photo provided)

* * *

To You Who Read These Lines

I share your gaze and the haze of my wish,

Your eye meeting my I; your inner thought,

Your self-same person, not myself and mine:

That I may share a space with you in you -

I, who have hoped too hard and trusted long,

But long without merit. May it be worth -

May I be worth the time taken to arrive,

On dusty pages; obsolete no more.

Not now, where two may be one, God dwells too.

Ourselves come marked, the dust fills our trail,

Still we meet and line by line we intertwine.

The thought of you loving you - Such goodness -

God’s goodness, indeed; But I, Human,

My eyes inside you; the one I would wish.

© 2015 DC Copeland                        

New York, New York  

DC Copeland (photo provided)

     

 *   *   *

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