Dire Straits

 

War is a game that the oligarchs play
to confirm their importance and try to portray
their significance and their efficacy,
and how they're remembered in history.

Like chess, it requires a great strategy:

are you willing to sacrifice all of your pawns

out-thinking the enemy with hope they’ll abscond?
A game on a board would have much clearer stakes:

an unhindered view to opponent’s mistakes– 

being able to see your opponent’s reaction
without obstruction or distraction.

But with lack of experience, how can you contend?
A player not only attacks, but defends–
you can’t hide intent inside lies of omission,

atonement not found in some act of contrition.
Balance and strategy are learned over time–
the more understanding, the higher you climb.

knowing how to refrain when you think you should strike,

reigning your words when you want to incite.
To confront with no foresight, in anger and spite
only prolongs the ongoing fight.

And your short term successes and minor defeats

have yet to inspire a hasty retreat–

you can’t solve or resolve or even the score

when opponent won’t cede to your ongoing war.

© Ginny Brannan 2026

Ghost Stories

 

You share your stories filled with ghosts 

your “what ifs” and your “coulda beens”

that left you with a heart in pain.

I see you and I raise you one:

my path could not have been more clear, 

until the day it disappeared.

My coulda/woulda/shoulda beens

fell victim to the shifting tides

where hope and hesitance collide.

Now we dance around each other’s words

–avoidance is a practiced art–

and hold back sharing any truth.

To stumble, worse, to crash and burn

is meant for others in their youth.

Dissolved, those castles made of sand,

long lost, the prince and maiden fair...

our innocence has been replaced:

we know too well the hidden tolls,
each tick mark carved out on our face.

I think the reason that we tarry

and write of angst and hidden pain

is a fence we build to guard what’s left

of a love we carry that is gone...

~ We can't be 'hurt' if we don’t respond ~

© Ginny Brannan 2025

Festering

 

You’re caught up in all of the stories you’re told

you watch every day as the falsehoods unfold

there’s no turning back and you will not concede

must stick to the plan now, there is no retreat

 

The barrage of deceit is your one recompense

streamed on a loop that doesn’t make sense

while you share fabrications you barely believe,

to admit you are wrong would accede to defeat

 

Contradictions and "fictions" mount by the score;

each new day bringing dozens more–

your mind’s lost in some kind of atrophy

while you wallow in ignorance, blissfully

 

And you can’t give it up and you won’t give in

to deny your support is a brazen sin

submerging yourself in hypocrisy

while trading out kindness for bigotry.

 

So we march to a place we did not foresee

full of unrestrained hate and brutality

fraught in our fears and uncertainty

inside this contentious reality.

 

How does one admit that the trail they chose

is tainted, as slowly their souls decompose

in a casket of misplaced morality

decaying inside of their own piety

 

© Ginny Brannan 2024

A Certain Slant of Light

 

There’s a certain slant of light

that casts on us in Spring

it calls the flowers to come out

and prompts the birds to sing.

 

The days stretch longer than before,

the stars are slow to shine;

an ocean breeze is sent to tease

and we respond in kind.

 

We watch the young males preening;

–a startled flock taking flight;

with each new dawn so earth responds

 to this new slant of light.

 

© Ginny Brannan 2024

 

Using NaPoWriMo 2024 prompt for Day 24, to start a poem with the first line of a favorite poet, mine is from Emily Dickinson’s  “There’s a Certain Slant of Light”

In these Grains of Our Existence

 

We are all made of stardust–

the signs are everywhere.

For four and a half billion years

floating on this spatial sea,

collecting bits of every planet that ever existed, 

every sun that no longer shines.

Quantum and classic physics aside,

deciphering our place on a finite line 

in an infinite universe boggles

even the sharpest of minds.  

Even our atoms resemble tiny solar systems.

and the elements that compose our human body

are also found inside the stars.

Made of stardust? You bet we are.

We are a miracle of evolution,

breathing the air from plants 

that existed a hundred million years ago.

We need not question who we are.

It is in everything that surrounds us.

All of us travelers in time

 walking among the stars.

© Ginny Brannan 2024

The grains of sand at Hoshizuna-no-Hamma beach in Okinawa, Japan are shaped like tiny stars. The star-shaped “sand” grains in Okinawa are actually the calcite endoskeletons of microscopic organisms known as Foraminifera.  Foraminifera are a quite old phylum, having been around since at least the Cambrian era (over 500 million years ago), 

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

The Seven Ages of Woman

 

I wonder how long it actually takes someone 

      to know exactly who they are....

we start a young child, wind under our wings

our mother’s daughter, father’s pride and joy,

already we are daughter, granddaughter, and niece,

all of these things in someone so small.

Next comes the schoolgirl: learning and growing...

we add student, friend, scholar to our repertoire;

perhaps even athlete and musician as well.

As we mature, so too, our sense of community

as we looks toward the future and what it can hold

and our pathway converges to coed and college girl–

the scholar, the tutor, attaining, advancing...

our life lies before us, the world is our oyster

as we shift to career woman, manager, boss.

Then comes a new stage on this path to the future–

deeper than friendship, a profound admiration 

filled with passion and fervor, unlike any other–

this need to exist just to be with another.

And so love evolves with its vows and its promises,

and we open our heart to a child of our own.

Now daughter, provider, friend, wife, and mother,

we watch as our child meets his own milestones...

while time keeps on moving, through gains and through losses, 

through comings and goings, through a young child growing—

until one day we find that we are alone 

for loved ones do pass, and children leave home.

Looking back now we count all the people we've been

the child, the student, the lover, the friend 

and now a new milepost on our plane of existence.

seen as sage and respected for all our experience.

Time, much like justice, tends to be blind

can’t know what’s before us, just what’s left behind

each act sets the stage for the next one to follow—

while the reaper, he waits in the wings for us all;

as for me, I can tell you, he’ll meet some resistance,

for much lies ahead till the last curtain falls.

 

© Ginny Brannan 2023

 

This is inspired by Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man From ‘As You Like It’

1.  Schoolboy 2. Teenager 3. Young Man 4. Middle Aged 5. Old Aged 6. Dotage & Death

Here I share my thoughts on the 7 ages of woman, with a bit more positive spin, I think. We transition with nary a notice except on reflection....and yet we are so much more than the sum of all of our "acts."

1. Child 2. Schoolgirl 3. Coed/College 4. Career 5. Wife  6. Mother 7. Elder

**For Alice, who grabbed onto a random comment of mine some years ago and suggested this as a possible 'book' title. No book (yet) though, just a poem. Thanks Alice, always, for inspiring and encouraging! 

Don't Blink

 

We wouldn’t recognize them

to save our soul

they prefer to remain anonymous

hiding behind the banter

of every day;

till out of the blue,

in a simple act of grace,

their better angel appears.

No warning. No fanfare.

Blink, and you've missed it.

One. Random. Act. Of. Kindness.

making someone’s day—

hearing a need, following through,

bringing it to bear...

 

No visible wings, and certainly no halo

yet, for an instant,

pretty sure they were there...

 

Blink, and you'll miss 'em....

 

© Ginny Brannan 2023

Matthew 25:40

Just an idea...

 

In the beginning was an idea

and the idea took root

and we drew stick figures

to share the images we saw.

But that wasn’t enough...

so we invented symbols

and symbols became letters

and letters became words

and we described the intangibles—

light and dark, hot and cold,

the sound that tree frogs make,

the “forty shades of green” on an Irish hillside,

the smell of the rain on a summer's day–

all the subtleties that paint the world

    —and everything in it.

The words became images again...

not stick figures, ones 

we could feel, could smell, could taste, could hear...

These images were written into languages

and lyrics, and poetry, and books;

shared in sculpture and art, photography and film,

to become the history of our civilization.

Never underestimate the power of an idea

for it will move mountains, ford rivers, cross oceans

travel to the moon and beyond—

in stories that will last much longer

 than any one of us ever will.

 

©Ginny Brannan 2023 

 

Cyphers

 

There is nothing to be said, and little can be done

to change what is and what has been and what we have become.

Hopes and dreams get tangled in a web of make-believe

ever closer to a place where we cannot retrieve.

Did we ever have a chance? How would we even know?

Your meager trail of breadcrumbs is now buried in the snow

And all that was, and all that is, and all that’s meant to be

fade now with morning light into obscurity. 

 

© Ginny Brannan 2023

Image: C. Parant Appetite for Photos.blogspot.com 

Used with expressed written permission.