Category: Thought Provoking

Blood On Our Hands

Blood On Our Hands

The smooth sands of a silent desert
now a windstorm of grit burrowing
into every orifice
Blinding and scratching eyes
Tasting and choking on the bitterness
of unannounced fury


The still waters of windless waves
become a raging, angry ocean
Swallowing the body whole
and regurgitating denialism
with each turbulent flow
of rampant wrath 


A forest, green and succulent
succumbing to heated, fiery ire
Crackling coniferous and deciduous woodland
Consuming beauty in a violent blaze
The tears of this earth become
blood on our hands



Copyright © 2022 Christine Bolton - Poetry for Healing
All Rights Reserved


Prompts

D’Verse - Open Link Night Hosted by Lillian
Earthweal - Open Link Weekend

Don’t Do It!

Don’t Do It!

No matter how strong you are
it is easy to slip into a man’s shadow


A desire to please and pander
May be your ultimate downfall
Some men will relish it and some will resent it
But they will take it anyway
You will be joyful in your nurturing 
Undeniably ecstatic in your union
Fussing and caring for your man
Then sure enough, before one can blink an eye
You have disappeared
Sucked into oblivion
Unnoticed, unheard and unknown


Copyright © 2021 Christine Bolton - Poetry for Healing
All Rights Reserved

Prompts:

May - Stream of Consciousness 
Joyful - Word of the Day
Union - RDP
Sure - FOWC

Handle With Care

Handle With Care

Would that we walk this earth with care labels
Visible on the outside that others might see
and know how we might be treated with care
To handle some as delicate with a gentle touch
Leaving to air dry in peace
and others with high heat and a heavy hand
Perhaps a warm iron if necessary 
We come without a handbook
of parts and assembly
Many times with fragile contents
and missing hardware
Who could understand how we are made up
and which piece should fit where
 
         Lift the memory carefully from the mind
         
         Caution: edges may be sharp 
         Place carefully away from harsh words
         said without thought or empathy
         as object could easily damage
 
 
Copyright © 2021 Christine Bolton - Poetry for Healing
All Rights Reserved


Linda Lyberg from Charmed Chaos is hosting Open Link
Night at D'Verse Poets

Photo by Pascal Bernardon on Unsplash

This is a "Found Poem" by taking words on instruction
labels or manual and using them for something else.
 

Now You See It …

Now You See It …

A snowflake falls in splendid silence
Unparalleled in undeniable uniqueness
As more and more fall slowly
delicately building upon each other
Creating walls of compacted
virgin whiteness stacked high
Reticent, uncommunicative
Sentinels of stillness, unmoving
Sadly survival is short-lived
Mixing meltwater mush
Eventually evaporating
into the same silence
from whence it came
 
 
Copyright © 2021 Christine Bolton - Poetry for Healing
All Rights Reserved
Laura Bloomsbury is hosting D'Verse Poets tonight
and has prompted us with 'Paradox' We were to choose
one of three lines from Paul Dunbar's "The Paradox"
or the line given from Wallace Stevens' The Snow Man"

I chose the second option:

"For the listener, who listens in the snow, And,
nothing himself, beholds nothing that is not there
and the nothing that is."


Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay
 

Religion Road

Religion Road

We are all heading to the same destination
just choosing a different way to get there
The highways and byways of religion
are jammed with the faithful
Frequent stops proselytizing
to the polite yet incurious
All with dogma to sell
But at what price?
 
 
Copyright © 2021 Christine Bolton - Poetry for Healing
All Rights Reserved

Lisa from Tao Talk is hosting
Monday Quadrille at D'Verse Poets
tonight and has prompted us with the word "Way"

A Quadrille is a poem of exactly
44 words, excluding the title 

Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay

Ripples

Ripples

In youth
we search for those
appealing to the eye
Their beauty would cause
a heart to skip
and our desires
live at the forefront
of their presence
 
We decorate each other
in brilliance of diamonds
and hold the other
in high esteem
as a possession
Only the most fortunate
can hold on to the gift
bestowed on them
 
Many will lose their grasp
and happiness slips away
over and over
The sting of pain
unseen, internal
Love a gift that
keeps on giving
Healing wounds
 
Scars remain
of memories faded
Dissolving in the lake
of recollection where
coming, going,
the waterbirds
don’t leave a trace
only ripples of once was
 
 
Copyright © 2020 Christine Bolton - Poetry for Healing
All Rights Reserved

Laura Bloomsbury is hosting D'Verse and has prompted
us with "Stepping off the sidewalk" and allowing ourselves
to look inside ourselves. (I chose number 2 -  by Dogen)

Here are 8 fragments from the mystic poets as prompt. Choose ONE, include the words in your poem or title if you wish, or write it as an Epigraph at the start of your poem and always cite the author too.


1. Our hearts irrigate the earth. We are fields before each other (Thomas Aquinas)
2. Coming, going, the waterbirds don’t leave a trace (Dogen)
3. Why should not the water find delight in the floral fragrance of its own rippled surface? (Jnanadev)
4. To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night (Gibran)
5. Like a ruby held up to the sunrise. Is it still a stone, or a world made of redness? (Rumi)
6. My heart was split, and a flower appeared (Solomon)
7. The mountain path leads skyward and dissolves into light (Tukaram)
8. Ask no questions of the moth in the candle flame (Attar)

Image by Mabel Amber from Pixabay 
 

Train of Thought

Train of Thought

Your words live
in my thoughts
Sometimes they delight
and are invited to stay
Other times they wound
and I show them the door

They feed my heart
Nourish my soul
and thoughts
become my words
flowing freely
back to you

When words harm
they linger in my head
slowly poisoning
a bruised spirit
And I cannot
speak to you

Instead I write
my thoughts
that spew forth
like demons
exorcised
from my body

So you might understand 



Christine Bolton - Poetry for Healing © 


in Response to Reena’s Exploration Challenge #153

Image by Irina Gromovataya from Pixabay 

A Two-Faced Landscape

My dear friend, Chuck Lindholm, known to many of you as The Reluctant Poet, who tirelessly shares our works on his site, made a wonderful suggestion that we collaborate on another poem together. A duet was the term he used and I liked the sound of that.

This is what we came up with. I do hope you enjoy it.

A Two-Faced Landscape

The Shifting Sands
Of The Desert
Have No Empathy
For The Confused
And Unprepared

An Arid Expanse,
A Two-Faced
Landscape,
Masking
The Truth,
And The Hidden
Dangers Ahead
With An Alluring Beauty
Misunderstood,
Layered And Complicated
She's Loved,
Yet Unloved Too,
A Lover To Some
And The Devil
To The Foolish
Unsurmountable
Obstacles Exist
For Those 
Who Never Learned
Her Secrets
Arduous
Exhausting
For Body And Soul
A Cage-Less Prison
With No Escape

For The Proud
And Disrespectful,
Burned By The Sun,
Victims Of Thirst,
Who Are Buried
By The Shifting Sands
And The Wind

By Christine Bolton And Charles Robert Lindholm

Copyright © 2020 Christine Bolton And Charles Robert Lindholm
All Rights Reserved 
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