Paper Wings
Is the earth falling or am I rising?
Paper wings catch the wind,
Be forever a gentle breeze, I pray.
Lift me from lowly places
Unburden this skin
Grown too tight for spirit form,
Captured long ago by longing for
Dragon flight in ground fog.
This weight–
This wait–
Too heavy for speedy travel,
Too slow for waking dreams.
New desires entice me now–
Free-falling into the abyss
With wings to fly.
© 2015 Bessie Adams Senette
Collage by Lisa Domingue
Tolerance or Adaptation?
Smoke rings lassoing mountain peaks,
Leftovers from western wildfires.
Newscasters have already moved
On to the next catastrophe.
East coast dams
Damning us with inadequate engineering
In the wake of a thousand year flood.
294 days in the year 2015,
274 mass shootings in the
Land of the free and the home of the brave.
Males in America own on average 7.9 guns.
Expect a massacre in your hometown.
Are we becoming more tolerant?
Are we just adapting to the new normal?
Frogs in a pot waiting for the boiling point
What bravery does it take to shoot a deer
With an automatic weapon?
How free are we, really?
Falling from grace our
Moral compass signals due north
While we continue south.
© 2015 Bessie Adams Senette
Photo by Carole Lancon
As a child, my favorite time of the year was fall especially the first cool, windy day usually occurring in late September. I would sit watching with my gooseflesh legs dangling from a thick branch as the wind blew the mature cane sideways until it almost laid flat. The air felt crisp, almost electrically charged and the smell was fresh with a promising harvest. Later, when the cut cane lay across the rows, sometime in the early morning, before I climbed up into my viewing tree, someone would set the fields on fire to burn off the leafy chaff. The combination of burning grass and cooking molasses is about as sweet a smell as I can remember.
Excerpt: ” Cutting the Clouds, a bayou mystic’s poems, musings, and imaginings”
Wanting
Muddled blackberries
Forgotten in the cocktail glass
For want of more vodka
His hawkish ways devoid of compassion for
Those standing on the head of a pin
For want of balance
This binary code world
Calculating risk and profit, wired for failure
For want of success
Bellowing bureaucrats, liars
Beguiling weary souls bereft of wonder
For want of justice
Falling angels, grace abandoned,
Spiral into abysmal longing
For want of wings
Forget compassion’s failure.
Be present only to this moment
For want of loss innocence © 2015 Bessie Adams Senette
The universal theme of a falling dream …
Do I wake in terror unwilling to face the outcome?
Do I persevere and see where I will land?
Do I breakthrough to another theme of flying?
Excerpt from ” Cutting the Clouds, a bayou mystic’s poems, musings and imaginings:”
The Head of a Pin
Standing on the head of a pin
Waiting for the wind to
Send me into the abyss.
I miss those days when
Caring meant sharing love,
Not spending it like coins
Slammed into a slot
On a wish and a prayer.
Not knowing when or if
The investment will see a return.
My concern
Is not for you
Or even about you
But without you
How will I remember
While standing on this pin,
How to trust again?
Only a fool forgets the wind.
A bigger fool still,
Forgets she has wings to fly.
© 2015 Bessie Adams Senette
Photo by Agni Nowinska
THE BAYOU MYSTIC 