Spring(ly)

Delicate stems bend, and petals shed in the April rains and March winds; early buds freeze in two-faced Spring.

 

Tulips and daffodils, croci, and hyacinths bend down before the weather’s onslaught.

Mismatched blossoms, missing random parts, determinedly turn their damaged faces to the meagre sun and strain to lift their bodies out of the clinging mud.

Why are the heralds of Spring designed with such frailty when early Spring is so harsh?

Ronda R. Scott-Marak

© 12 April 2022🌷🌼

Christmas 1914

A single voice, a Christmas Carol, a song of Stillness and Peace;

Another voice, and many more singing different words to a familiar tune.

Guns stopped, silenced by shared humanity and blended harmonies; peace loudly proclaimed by handshakes, shared smokes, and songs while war stopped for the Eve and Day to celebrate a birth.

Moments out of time; whose were the first voices raised in song, and whose the first gunfire when Day was Done, and why start up again?

Ronda R. Scott-Marak

© 25 December 2019

Jack Frost

Lightly coating lashes, outline shadow pines,

soft snow feathers float and drift across the night.

Flick’rng ice stars ‘gainst the silv’ry bedtime dark;

indigo canvas, dusted with points of light.

Crystallised frost flowers bloom on windowpanes;

Cold flakes on tongues, 

melt and relish winter’s bite.

Dreamers and rovers soar and tramp atop the ice;

Pirouette and glide amid the snowflakes’ flight.

Ronda R. Scott-Marak

© 16 December 2013

Like Tzedakah

Use your words like your tzedakah:

with generosity for good, not ill.

Use words like money:

Sparingly when angry or for ill, lavishly in generosity or grace. 

Speak of love and gratitude with full expression, of hate and 

cruelty as a miser.

Be frugal with your negativity, criticism, and disapproval

but give charity, praise and kindness openly, with both hands.

Ronda R. Scott-Marak

© 31 August 2019

Book of Life; the end of the story?

  

 

No, the chapter is unfinished, the penultimate paragraph unwritten,
the final sentence incomplete. 

The verb has stopped its movement, and the noun has gone, never to return.

 

The cantata’s finale?

No, the aria remains unsung; the movement incomplete, the measure unfinished, the chord unresolved.
The resonance echoes still.

 

Ronda R. Scott-Marak
© 30 May 2022

 

Discordant Discourse

(Dedicated to Andy Dennen and his music)

We are so many individual notes incapable of forming a chord,
only single, miscellaneous notations

Why can’t we arrange our thoughts and words into measures and phrases coming together to create harmony instead of clashing sounds in different keys and time signatures?

We are so used to crashing, blaring, and harsh cacophony that the sweetness of melody has been buried beneath the constant dissonance.

Not that all dissonance is bad;

atonal compositions can be as lovely as sweet harmonies and resolved chords.

Improvisation, the scat of unfinished thought;

cadenzas, descants, flourishes, and unusual intervals are as important to discourse as to music.

Yet, here we are, single notes marching formless and alone with no one to arrange cadence.

 

Ronda Scott-Marak

© 9 July 2022

Twilightening

 

My mind is shrouded with fatigue

My eyes heavier than my will

My body floats lightly yet sinks like lead into the cushions. 

So much to do

So little desire to do anything except lie here, amid the blankets’ softness and listen to windchimes and the songs of birds

Ronda R. Scott-Marak

© 18 July 2021