WOOD-WOMAN

 

I am Yeats’s wood-woman

Wandering the woods

Dressed in black

Mourning the loss

Of my lover who

Was changed into a

Blue-eyed hawk

The wood is small

4.4 MOL acres now

Trapped between 

A noisy highway with

4-stroke motorcycle engines

Sounding like riding lawn mowers

Bass-lines booming from car stereos

Slicing through my head

Alone, but not wishing

I am dead

Swamp shrinking but no longer care

Too many birds and animals

Screeching out death cries

As habitat no longer supports

What once was a city oasis

And more encroachers on my

Once-quiet dirt road

Look at me with scorn

"My dad says you’re a witch"

The neighbor’s son sneers

Mirroring Salem, I think, they covet

The two lots with a bayou view

They want to burn me for my earth

I am alone in my black dress

But like my one-time lover

The blue-eyed hawk

I too have wings

Cosmically, we will be a pair

And unlike Yeats’s women

My beauty was not folded in dismay

Because the black dress

Is discarded each moonlit night

Revealing my true color

I am the fiery red phoenix

Rising from the ashes of despair…

 

© Clarissa Simmens (ViataMaja)

IMAGE: Sundown Live Oak

Based on a few lines from William Butler Yeats’s

UNDER THE MOON

 

 

BARD’S GARDEN

 

Unable to sleep so
Reading about the
Shakespeare Garden
Where only plants
Mentioned in his plays
Sonnets, writings
Are allowed to flourish
Impossible to plant one
In Florida
At least for an amateur
Apple trees? Not possible
In a yard loaded with
Live Oaks and dripping
Spanish Moss
I see myself walking around
Pulling off a leaf
Releasing the scent
By squeezing out the life
Can’t sleep because I get crazy
About being a vegetarian
Because so sure plants feel pain
But the alternative is to starve
Besides, I’ve become a pescetarian
In my old age
Craving protein

So here’s my drabarni’s garden
With tarot cards and crystals
Hanging from trees
And I suddenly hear the Beatles sing
Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds
Code for LSD? we wondered in our teens
Never dropped acid myself
Always high on life
Did take some tokes
And now 2 bottles of Hemp Oil
Wait for me on the computer table
Will it help my creaky joints
Or is it better to smoke a joint
Are they still called that?
Didn’t do much weed
Yes, it enhanced happiness
Creativity
But also sadness

So where was I?
Shakespeare’s garden
So tossing and turning
I imagine walking around my
Themeless garden
A mad bard’s garden
Instead of planting
All the botanicals
Appearing in my poems
I write the poems
Based on what’s already planted
Floratam and wild grasses
January daisies
Browned air potato vines
And banana leaves
Tattered ginger greens
Hiding the harvest below ground
Naked mulberry trees
Chili peppers frozen in clumps
Palms waving in forty degrees
Dreaming of summer’s flames of
Red Hibiscus
Orange Cosmos
Yellow Jasmine
Dressed in bright green
Turquoise dragon flies flitting
Indigo skies cooling solar flares
Violet waves residing in planetary tides
None appear in a Shakespeare world
But it is winter
And I think of the drabarni

Drabarni is the Empress
Queen of Wands
She is every woman in the tarot deck
Who nurtures and heals
Body and soul
TAROT CARDS ARE A VEHICLE
To bring two together
The Interpreter is really the listener
Feeling the pain or anxiety
From the Questioner
Silently begging for
Alleviation
Rejuvenation
From the shadow side of life
Tarot cards are
After all
Pieces of wood
Pieces of cardboard
Numbers and symbols
Yet, a way to open a dialog
Between the confusing world
And those of us who sometimes wander
Alone and entwined in a hopeless fog
TAROT CARDS ARE A MAP
Terrestrial navigation
Through gardens of chaos
Into orderly beds of
Comforting words
“Help me, I’m lost!”
Cries the Questioner
And all the Interpreter can say is
“I will try…”

 

(c) 2019 Clarissa Simmens (ViataMaja)
IMAGE: BEGONIAS

 

YOU MAY BE INTERESTED IN THE BOOK I AM READING:
Botanical Shakespeare: An Illustrated Compendium of all the Flowers, Fruits,
Herbs, Trees, Seeds, and Grasses Cited by the World’s Greatest Playwright
Kindle Edition by Gerit Quealy (Author), Sumie Hasegawa Collins (Author), & 1 more

 

 

INSANITY PANDEMIC

 

Can it be?

Every day there is a

RECALL

Of food and medicines

Every day!

Is it sabotage?

Or fake hysteria?

Every day there is a

BANNING

Of books

Every day!

Is it stupidity?

Every day there is a

Water problem

RECALLS of bottled water

WARNINGS of city water

Needing to be boiled

CLOSING down beaches

Because of red algae

I can go on and on

But cannot help wondering

Can insanity be qualified

As a pandemic?

Because it defies belief

That our world is falling apart

Our food, water, intellectual pursuits

ALL RECALLED?

Just asking…

 

© 2024 Clarissa Simmens (ViataMaja)

IMAGE: I’m with the banned/band

 

 

“M” IS FOR…  

 

Change the Music

Change the Mood

Moxibustion burning skin

With Mugwort 

Too radical for me

Moon Makes for 

Major healing

Abandoned Mines of alchemical Mercury

Mortality Miming Megalithic Movements

Massive Monuments from prehistory

Is it Murder when we die before we're ready?

Mammoth DNA sleeping

In Melting glaciers

Moguls ruling, stealing our Money

No big deal for Me

Life was never the penthouse

Always the Mezzanine

Mother Earth and Father Sky

Forcing us into time outs

As weather Madness blamed

On everyone, everything

But it's Kafka's cockroach 

Merging with Modernity

Merely Metamorphosis …

 

© 2024 Clarissa Simmens (ViataMaja)

IMAGE: Kafka’s The Metamorphosis book

 

 

 

GET ME OUTTA HERE (ONCE AGAIN)*

 

I really needed something different today

Like some notes from a melody

Never heard before

Instead, pounding at my head

Was a cacophonic fire truck siren

Accompanied by my dogs howling anxiously

 

I wanted color peeking through the

Greenery never seen before

Just something

Something different

Because it was like being in

Doctor Who’s Tardis but

It wasn’t bigger on the inside

Just small and smothering

 

So I walked over to the backyard fence

Smelling odd, unidentifiable odors

Like dead swamp animals

Part of the 90 degrees

Live Oak leaves

With wilted trees

And once-proud shrubs

Mutilated by yesterday’s lightning

And slashing rain

 

Worse, I noticed

Sap from a dying Schinus Terebinthifolius

Meaning no Brazilian Pepper branches

For the Winter Solstice

How I nursed it until it grew

All those beautiful red berries

Brightening my meager offerings

I owe the tree so much

And want to give it a respectful burial

Carrying it into the swamp keening and singing

While covering it in years of

Decaying, mulched matter

Cannot bear to cut it down

So I lean against it, gently pushing it

Back to Mother Earth

What’s a life worth?

 

Oh, what is wrong with me?

I love life so much

But not today

Cannot see or hear or even feel anything

Yet it’s a beautiful day

But I don’t know where to go

I feel lost standing in a place

Usually loving it under such beautiful flora

I have enough to eat

I have enough to buy something fun

There is no worrying war

The sky is blue and

All the elements are behaving

But I don’t feel like I’m home

I need to find home

And I don’t know what to do…

 

*Florida summers give me cabin fever

 

© 2024 Clarissa Simmens (ViataMaja)

IMAGES: Dead Brazilian Pepper tree/

Brazilian Pepper Branches from the tree last December

 

 

 

TIME MACHINE SPELLS

 

Mathematicians are the shamans

Performing exquisite chantings

In a code that few can understand

Boogie Boarding over

Wavelets of Time

I so want to get back

Start all over

Smooth out the regrets

Live like a warrior

But neither

Science

Magic

Religion

Can help

In my rare dreams

Most people do not

Make eye contact

Although they speak

But I do not really hear

Because I think of

Childhood periods

Unknown autism

Interfering with my ability

To look in their eyes

Eventually I learned to

Fake it until it was real

Or I believed it was real

And then along came Aging

Where the weak eye

Reasserts

And we are down to one

Maybe it’s our third eye?

Hung on the tree

After cataract surgery

As Odin, we all arise

One-eyed but wise

Dangling on Yggdrasil…

 

© 2024 Clarissa Simmens (ViataMaja)

IMAGE: #12 Hanged Man from holographic tarot