Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Coloring Outside the Lines


 





I‘d never put my work up with the classics,

I wallow somewhere in obscurity.

How often have I struggled with my formats

 and lines that run into infinity ........

And meter’s so restrictive in its confines

while free verse struggles hard to find the ‘end’

and style’s but a word that’s used to define

the voice the writer chooses to extend.

Shakespeare had a knack for writing sonnets,

Dickinson wrote quatrains in slant rhyme;

Poe tiptoed on the edge of the ‘demonic’

while Frost wrote of a kinder, gentler time—

and my ideas drop scattered and chaotic

  another would-be poet tweaking lines.

 

© Ginny Brannan 2024


Tuesday, February 13, 2024

The Connection

 










We look for the pretext, the hidden connection

a word to encourage, a sign someone cares–

it’s not in their words that we garner the meaning

but inside the knowledge that someone is there.

Caught up in this void is the echo of voices,

the faces once clear disappear from display;

we hide them away in a cache deep inside us

not willing to share lest we give them away.

The winter months beg to be given our secrets

but who’s really listening to what we might say?

In the silence and emptiness, in hollow of loneliness

lie the chapters of stories and things we’ve outgrown,

yet we cannot forget all the places we’ve come from
the communion of friendship, the people we’ve known.

We’re born to this world, become one among many—

  it seems when we leave, that we all go alone.

 

© Ginny Brannan 2024


Photo credit: C. Parant at Appetite for Photos. Used with expressed written permission.


"We come into the world alone, we leave the world alone." James Anthony Froude

Tuesday, February 6, 2024

For the "Dreamers"


 













I live in the realm of hopes and dreams

where life is more than what it seems

where kindness fills the emptiness;

where givers give with open hearts

and expectations don’t exist.

Where the broken and the scarred

are not dismissed as too much risk.

Where strength and fortitude are honed

and sculpted out of dirt and clay...

 and man does not exist alone.

A broken vessel on display

holds so more than what is seen,

and who are we to wipe away

existence of another’s dream?

 

© Ginny Brannan 2024



Sunday, January 28, 2024

"Testing, Testing...One, Two, Three"

 



Hope lies between the lines

of dreams and of unanswered prayer

as we, mere mortals, search to find

peace from pain we've buried there.

               *  *  *  *  *

Believe in the power if you choose

that parts the seas and turns the tides

Could such entreaty be refused;

a whispered word of urgency

from the place where love resides?

 

When all else fails we’re left to conjure

hope beyond all hope to cure

the ills from which there’s no returning;

I watched you fade into thin air...

you wonder why faith disappears?

 

How many prayers have you seen answered?

How many hearts are left to bear

the pain of loss despite “believing”

that there’s a God that truly cares

while undeserving loved ones leave us

    lost in our unanswered prayer.


                  *  *  *  *  *

“No” has always been the answer,

reprieve short lived; the end’s the same.

We look to pin the fault on someone,

but really there’s no one to blame.

Miracles are not forthcoming

we bear our loss as best we can

our questions gather dust, unanswered

derived from pitting God to man.


© Ginny Brannan 2024


Image: Photographer C. Parant, Appetite for Photos. Used with espressed written permission.

Tuesday, January 23, 2024

The Price We Pay

 

‘Pinch me,’ I cried, ‘awake me from this dream

 I’m stuck somewhere between

  the place of love and loss.”

My losses have been many,

  too well I know the cost. 

 

Alas, I do not sleep,

too many hearts I keep...

  love is never cheap

 

 

Joining De Jackson at D’Verse Poets Pub today for Quadrille #193. 
A Quadrille is a small succinct poem of exactly 44 words. It may rhyme...or not. Today's Quadrille is to be written to include the word "pinch" in one of it's many forms.


Monday, January 15, 2024

Forsaken











She met him on the path that led

up past the iron gate,

wrapped up in her winter cloak

could barely see her face.

He’d spoken of the future, 

and all the things he’d do

And promised that when he was set,

he’d come back for her, too,

The road to hell is paved 

with intentions that are good,

filled with ‘what ifs’, and some ‘maybes’
but not always with “coulds”

They could  have gone together

instead he went alone,

she waved  at him and smiled, 

he nodded and was gone.

But that smile was the last smile

to come upon her face

not knowing that the hug they shared, 

would be their last embrace.

Sometimes way leads on to way, never to return;

time is a not a given,  love’s lessons are hard learned.

So hold on tight to what you have

don’t leave to chance or fate.

trust your instincts don’t give in

tomorrow may be too late.

 

© Ginny Brannan 2024


Image credit: Joanne Davis, Bellows Falls, VT. Used with expressed written permission. 

 

*Prompted Poetry from D’Verse Prosery, January 15th, 2024: to use the specific line, written here in “boldface” in a poem or story. Confessing that I saw the lovely image first, and wrote this piece around it. The boldfaced line comes from a poem by Dudley Randall called "Ballad of Birmingham" written in 1963 quite ahead of the death of Martin Luther King, about the bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama.

"Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that.

 Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that." MLK Jr.

************************************************

OOPS! Apparently Prosery is more short story than a poem, of 144 words. I am not a short story person, although a poem can tell a story. And I blew it with 160 words! Guess I'll stick to what I am good at!

Saturday, January 13, 2024

A Work In Progress


 










Like a puzzle, we put together the pieces—

framing our thoughts, studying the board

deciding what fits where, arranging,

re-arranging until the picture we’ve created

makes sense, everything in its rightful place.

Yet sometimes we think it done, only to find

a piece has gone astray. We search high and low

to no avail, only to discover much later 

that the piece was not gone, but hiding in plain sight

waiting to be found, to become part of the whole.

Sometimes we stare too long, trying to discern,

even trying to make things fit where they do not belong.

Some things cannot be rushed, they unfold

as they should, in their own time, not in ours. 

And as the puzzle unfolds, we discover correlations

with our own life: words, lines, actions, emotions—

all are small parts of a very large picture. 

And sometimes we must step back to see 

the beauty of what we have created.

 

© Ginny Brannan 2024