Today my thoughts are on Master Sergeant Joe D.
my brother who was four years younger than me.
Growing up Brother Joe was always the battler,
he took no one’s “stuff” and was never a prattler.
At twenty one I entered and Brother Joe came soon,
to the Army’s ways Joe seemed to quickly attune.
He rose to Master Sergeant in his twenty-three years,
four tours in Nam kept family in prayer and tears.
He was highly decorated and many proclaimed a hero,
but when life all boiled down it amounted to zero.
He disappeared from family for thirty plus years,
all this time we searched, prayed, and shed tears.
For his country he did things he couldn’t forget,
then died lost from family, in a sea of regret.
Joe isn’t there but a headstone marks his spot,
to remind of his surviving the Viet Cong onslaught.
His life is a shadowbox that hangs on our wall,
I’m reminded of Joe each time I enter the hall.
So today, I pray that for life choices he did atone,
as for me, Joe will never become as a forgotten stone.
Categories:
shadowbox, brother, memorial day, military,
Form: Couplet
In a box full of Shadows...
Dwell objects of Cryptic Imagery...
Through ancient Frosted glass...
Fractured like spider webs.
Creep items of the unknown or the forgotten.
From rusted gears of broken
clocks and crazy cracked crystal rocks.
To skulls of black cats,
And wings of Vampire bats,
Lay objects of mystery,
A severed claw of a dove,
A cards proclamation of someones
undying love and haunted misery.
Gears, strings, and wound springs...
Some very strange things fight the decay.
Worms crawl, flesh pluses, blood seeps,
Onto faded families secret photographs.
Unnameable insects beat their wings endlessly…
While stuck with pins in a frame
from childhood experiments.
Next to some exotic erotic toxic
Rune manuscripts.
Old odd bones roam
Forbidden machines hum
Spiders play, pray on sliver humanity
All these things lay quiet and forgotten in…
A BOX full of deep SHADOWs
And haunted histories
Things, beings, and deities
sit in a forgotten corners
deserted, forlorn, unknown
In a House that no one knows
Secrets dwell within...
the sealed, SHADOWBOX!
Categories:
shadowbox, allegory, corruption, death, dream,
Form: Free verse
Cupid tapped my sailor on the shoulder,
“That one…” he pointed at me.
He aimed at me, sent the sailor’s seabag too -
we shoot to the top of Everest
with all its dangers.
We tumble and climb, tumble and climb
until at last we are forever in each other’s grasp.
My sailor proposed too fast with a golden ring.
I accepted after he begged for two weeks.
Mind over matter was defeated by head over heels.
I had been shy. If we had met earlier we might have passed by
each other but the playing field was all new. There was adventure
in his soul and longing in my heart to soar to new heights.
The sailor’s seabag was heavy with his past
but he found love and loves (children and grands)
and a God that was bigger than everything.
Tulips delirious dance, twelve with big fat leaves. Tulips alive
with life not death. Roses hold beauty but tulips last.
A sailor’s ring surrounds my finger. Ebon-etched leaves, unique.
Cupid’s bow in shadowbox - a little worn and bent in our heart shape.
2/7/2021
Categories:
shadowbox, marriage, valentines day,
Form: Free verse
Summer sun's shadows pass like sand grasps.
Time twinkles by like leaves' lost green
Succumbing to weather's bend,
crimson crisps swirl to earth
like feathers' descent.
A grown child
picks up a
barn owl
quill.
Sun
trickles
upon her
shadowbox frame,
holding a green pressed
oak leaf gathered from youth.
Preserved words spill from her quill.
Arrangements change daily when she
tilts the hour glass to watch sand pass.
1-1-2020
Categories:
shadowbox, age, art, change, child,
Form: Nonet
Memorial Day 2020
Remembering Our Brother, Joe D.
By: Miracle Man
Memorial Day 2020
(Remembering Our Brother Joe D. and His Service)
Miracle Man
His life,
Is a shadowbox on our nondescript wall,
and gravestone that rests in the Wright plot.
I recall his life as always being A.W.O.L.
causing family to always live in fraught.
God answered our prayers and he returned,
but Vietnam had laid a claim on his being.
Today i wonder why family was spurned,
with his life choices, i was seldom agreeing.
Each time he returned i could see a change,
he served four tours in “Nam” and in between.
I saw a transformation that seemed strange,
I attributed this to things he’d done and seen.
So today, I endeavor to ascertain Joe’s thoughts,
was Vietnam the reason he chose to live life alone?
While each year I fail in connecting the dots,
Joe will never become to family, a forgotten stone.
Categories:
shadowbox, hero, memorial day,
Form: Lyric
COLOR FORMS
The movers and shakers of art delight.
In the shadowbox-brain they regain sight.
Dear Dorothy clicks her sarcoline heels.
Her striped boat sailing on sea-hued teals.
Zenith dawn blazes in coquelicot hue.
The artist’s tipsy trees blushed pink and blue.
Majestic Oz - smaragdine-jeweled city.
Ponies prance romantic colors - witty.
Brush brush brush then fill the scarecrow with straw.
His prideful chest overloaded and raw.
The movers and shakers of art transform
Fairy tales into surreal color forms.
10/12/2018
Anthony Slausen’s The Paint Movers Contest
sarcoline - flesh colored
coquelicot - (kohk-li-coh) - red like wild poppy
smaragdine (sma-rag-din) - emerald
Categories:
shadowbox, art,
Form: Rhyme