Along the waters edge I strolled, as wavelets wet my toes
Rockpools filled with hidey holes where wary crabs had chose
To wait for the coming tide to venture out once more,
Hiding from the hunters, who scour the open shore.
Empty carapaces, lay scattered here and there
Evidence of those who thought they'd take a fleeting dare,
So as I stroll along, thinking life is sweet
For some it is hide or die, just beneath my feet.
Categories:
carapaces, nature, sea,
Form: Rhyme
A dry wind lifts
a damp fringe of
gray hair.
She is wrinkled,
her mouth sunken
over dentures.
She's as thin as dust
but glows
on the edge of her ruin.
The earth aches.
It once made love to her
and still aches to enfold her,
to seed her again with
its time-buried starshine.
In this concrete thoroughfare
with its crawling steel, blind windows,
and metaled carapaces,
she is Eve.
Categories:
carapaces, poetry,
Form: Blank verse
Modeled by the skilled and clumsy hands
of artists and artisans into an ideal state of she-ness,
a penniless waif appears on a stool
last week a stranger called her Mona Lisa.
Statuesque upon the betrayer
warmed by the lemon-lolly light from
bays of north facing windows, blinded;
she can but blink.
Surrounded by a
cog-notched cyclical wheel of nubile artists—
blooming buds of wildness, vertical sprigs
flail softly on the breezy bounty of
illumination.
Brush and trowel, thick and thin,
the artists stoke her—semblance
canvased by millennium brush biters
maudlin Mary is returned to the pre-historic stew
by the likes of Claude
polished to a pearly perfection
by type A, Hieronymus’.
They were all strangers to her posers,
every bit as much as she.
Royal pretenders in a world
where only the artless
are paid.
Moneylenders rise on their discarded carapaces
beauty sucked dry by the doers and shakers
who spread like choking bittersweet through
the lollypop-light from the bay windows facing north
consuming Mona.
Julie ford Oliver - Famous Models
Ekphrasis
First Appeared in Illumen Magazine Fall of 2014
Categories:
carapaces, allusion, symbolism, woman,
Form: Ekphrasis
I should just let you go
But it feels a little like
Holding your beautiful face under the water
Watching your reflection flicker into your last breath
I should just
Summon suitcases to pack up
Our summer beach trip
When your hair was like wheat, and disappeared into the grass
You were bright against the drawn curtain of clouds
My star sister, with our heels dirty with sand and motherhood
I secretly waited for your heart to misfire
The corners of my eyes recognizing the embers
I can still see how you picked apart your food at dinner
Bite by bite-- your slender fingers reminding me of a crabs
This is also how you sorted and shelved your life
Empty carapaces gobbled up clumsily by the waves
Red fire, gold and silently
You picked me clean and set my crown on the lacquered shelf
No longer awake and calm in your heart
I am neat and tidy, far from all things remembered
Categories:
carapaces, friendship, loss, me,
Form: Quatrain