RESURRECTION:  ROSE OF JERICHO

(Selaginella lepidophylla)

Daily dream

End of pandemic

Changes?

Developmental stages

Of humans

Dictate reactions:

Children will be children

Just a blip

Extended school vacations

Now over

Life

Like a salty wave on sand

Continues obeying the

Moon’s command

And life

Returns to normal

Teens always immortal

Meeting and greeting

Strength pumping

No fear from a

Casual cough

A sneeze

It is once again

Friendship

As hormones float on the breeze

Young adults

See cracks in the

Mirror of Immortality

But nothing serious

As careers and caresses

Determine the future

Of long life ahead

And now the mid-forty-somethings

Begin to sense

The beginnings of pain

Bones creaking in bed

Hearing whispered warnings

In their head

Post-pandemic protocol

Lingers longer in daily lives

But still

The watchword

It can’t happen to me

…can it?

And what of the elderly?

Dreaming day as well as night

Drifting under a

Black starless sky

Wedge of white moon

Gleaming on a trellis

Of ruby-red roses

Thorns

The elderly see the thorns

The elderly feel the thorns

As we rock out to our

Beloved music

Dressed in jeans

Dressed in Goth black

Carefully avoiding mirrors

In bright rooms

The pandemic never left

We live in fear of death

Death by disease

Or whatever the reaper may please

So I lovingly place

A tumbleweed of

Rose of Jericho

In spiritual water

And as the seemingly-dead roots

Begin to turn green

I can say I have touched and seen

Resurrection…

© 2020 Clarissa Simmens (ViataMaja)

IMAGE:  Before & After Rose of Jericho

               (Heirloom Reviews)

APOCALYPSE DOLLARS*

I just want to celebrate another day of livin’

I just want to celebrate another day of life—Rare Earth

While good feng shui-ing

My home

By tossing 20-year detritus

I find a pack of cigarettes

Haven’t smoked in decades

But I think

“Currency!”

Something to swap

For a loaf of bread

In case

In case the apocalypse

Descends upon us

Cigarettes for a loaf of bread

To keep me alive

An extra day

Seriously, Clarissa…?

© 2020 Clarissa Simmens (ViataMaja)

IMAGE:  Collecting Currency

*Confessional poet/ reveals a moment/ of the darkness in her mind 😊

UNDER URSA MINOR

Can’t sleep

May in Florida

Seventy-two degrees

Seventy-two years

Maybe seventy-two coffee beans

Waiting to be ground

Walk outside

Stunned by humidity

Probably seventy-two too

There’s Ursa Minor

Fading into the

Early morning sky

Grayer than my hair

Cardinals eating

Wrens rapping

Woodpecker pecking

The metal TV aerial

Blue Jays aggressive

Those colorful Corvids

Cousins to Crows

And my two faithful dogs

Howl in joy

Blissful ignorance

No Covid-19

Or approaching old age

Or life-changing events

For them

And the Bear fades

Completely

Asleep until its stars

Wake up tonight

Fixed in the sky

So far one will die

Red giant

T Ursae Minoris

Already erupted in a thermal pulse

As one day our own star

Our lovely sun

Will also leave

The ceiling of my world…

© 2020 Clarissa Simmens (ViataMaja)

IMAGE: Under Ursa Minor

SEDATELY SAUNTERING

Brambling buckets of blackberries

Hands torn by thorns
Moving from bushy density
To towering treeful forest
Lightning-struck structures
Of burned bark becoming
Horizontal forest barriers
Keeping some out
Some in
But either way we can win
Crackling clumps of leafy deciduosity
Red-orange-green
Self-composted bridges breaking
Bubbled muddy carpetry
Winding through lean, mean lanes
And I hear my name
Sung through dappled sunshine
Leading me mysteriously
As I walk erect and brave
Passing hidden graves of
Unknown feathered poets
Who serenaded their ribbon
Of life's silken road
Composing high-strung music
Of unrecognized joy and tears...'

(c) 2020 Clarissa Simmens (ViataMaja)

IMAGE: Swamp Forest 1
Previously published by The Poet By Day 2020

WHY'D YOU GO?

WHY’D YOU GO? Turn back! Turn back! Don’t turn your back on us Heading for the unreality We cannot see We cannot hear How some of us needed you Listening to a gift from the aethers Clutching the album Identifying iconic faces And no more misheard lyrics As words from every song Danced across the back Of that magical Sgt. Pepper sleeve Containing the holy grail of the 60s Black words on red And we wondered WTH are “plasticine porters”? Who needed drugs With your reality becoming ours Through music and glorious words Sitar sounds “Within You Without You” Endless chord of “A Day in the Life” “A Little Help From My Friends” (Why do I always see and hear Joe Cocker there?} And when I finally turned 64 Numberless decades later It became my birthday song But you turned on us I know, you had to do it You all had to be free but Just wish you’d been like the Stones Together until the end I’m sure they’ll be So I stare at this alternative photo As you reveal that it was all a dream But no matter because Your words were truth So very long ago… © 2020 Clarissa Simmens (ViataMaja) IMAGE: Alternative Sgt. Pepper cover

“Picture yourself on a train in a station
With plasticine porters with looking glass ties
Suddenly someone is there at the turnstile
The girl with the kaleidoscope eyes”--Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds

From Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album