"Junk Mail"

 

I am just an ‘Occupant’ occupying space,

stamped as Presort Standard, lost among the bills

not good enough for First Class: I travel without frills

 

Sorted, looked at, tossed away without nary a glance.

With no pathway forward, how can I advance?

 

A one-way ticket’s all I am and all I’ll ever be

another piece of ‘junk mail,' that’s what you see in me.

© Ginny Brannan 2024

Today's Prompt came fro Writers.com for Day 3 of NaPoWriMo: Collect scraps of “junk writing”—spam mail, credit card bills,  etc. Stitch together into a poem. I chose to go a little more literal, and ran with it.

Growing "Stones"

 

The stones were scattered throughout the field...

every Spring another crop 

would rise to the surface again, 

to be meticulously gathered

and stacked along the perimeter

differentiating our land from theirs;

subdividing, eliminating any question

of whose crops or herds belonged where.

How could we know that land that we claimed

was only ours on borrowed time?

The natives here before us knew we didn’t own the land;

the waters nor the air are not here for our command.

We are caught hook, line, and sinker in the follies we believe

taught to think our legacy’s in all we have achieved.

Now those walls become the ghosts

of the farmsteads that have passed...

What we thought might be forever never truly lasts.

© Ginny Brannan 2024

Photo by Charlie Parant at Appetite for Photos. Used with expressed written permission.

One of the NaPoWriMo sites offers suggestion to write for Day 2, Not Your Usual Harbinger.

In 100 Words or Less...

 

Feeling tired and overwrought

I sat to write—I know not what,

contemplating what to share

inside this state of my impairment.

 

Perhaps a sonnet of devotion 

that’s steeped in unrevealed emotion

confessing dreams and aspirations

dispensing rules and reservations.

 

Yet, without context or inflection,

it will not garner your attention,

sidelined by my own inaction

another victim of rejection.

 

And I have neither time nor patience

the well is dry, the cupboard bare.

The mind is willing, the body able;

but can't write when the words aren’t there.

© Ginny Brannan 2024

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), 

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

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

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