I was born and only heard those tender cute stories about it. My mother talks with a neat little buttoned face about that day but I can only nod my head.
I only got a clumpy dry handful of arid brown coins when leaves of fruitful green bills were being waved in my face the way royalty flashes their diamond riches to the meagre faces of hungry peasant.
We all have vivid memories both dark and uplifting; either way, each have a peculiar influence on us even if we have defined our personality through all our sweaty years living through them.
It is perhaps even the memories we do not quiet remember but constantly get stuck between our tactful eyes that say just a little bit more.
It is the hazy shadows traced messily on the back wall of our eyelids that harp us like a stubborn song in our head that relentlessly loops like the long cord on a small vacuum cleaner.
The first few memories wail on our conscience but only in little hungry pickings, fragments, and shards.
Fragile memories develop like the misty photographs from a scratched and dusty negative, sound like the distant cacophony when the tail end of an echo leaps into the trees for coverage, and read like a story printed on ink-stained paper.
A memory of mine, what ever time or place it may have been, popped up from a flat lifeless book and animated itself, first in hatched grey lines, and then into solid strokes and venturous hues.
This faint memory was starchy and cloudy like a brazen orange street light when it is viewed at with a perfect glass marble placed before your eye.
I slowly lifted the glistening gem from my eye and took the mere seconds in frame by frame. Mother Nature tenderly wove her nimble green fingers into my yearning dead pupils, took them like a pallet, and affectionately painted me a motley gallery of landscapes.
A tempestuous pink ribbon ripped a hole in the knotty canvas and took a lavish flight colourfully filling vacuous darkness. The abyss met chaos and collapsed upon its differences twisting neatly together with the rosy string.
The earth started shaking and through her cracking smile the earth spit out sludge and lava upon the billow and roar of her warm contagious laughter.
The sky turned crimson and exploded profusely into malevolent blue flame as white brilliant lightning trashed through the cloudy illustrations and sliced the plains into unfair proportions.
Through the profane rings of thick woolly smoke, the pink balls of light unwrapped delicately towards the clearing and twirled like lace upon the gaunt unadorned branches of a dead and sagging tree.
As the storm cleared and where the indigo fire died, the sky was left blue and vibrantly singing a jovial tune with the wispy clouds where the smoke then vanished.
The creation of earth was the creation of memory and upon the tree branches is what I now remember most from those colourful ephemeral days. Upon the tree branches were cherry blossoms.
I spent years and many dreams trying to swim through me descriptions of what I thought was an otherworldly phenomenon on somethin’ that was as simple as cherry blossoms, simple aromatic pink flowers.
My indefinite memory forced me to search for it. It wasn’t until I found a photograph of my family on vacation in Maryland that I was able to really get the dirt from under that fingernail.
Up until that point my utter frustration about this floating pink memory was left to be interpreted by finding a confidence in using words and pictures.
Author notes
Note...this is a story-type-thing-y
I don't really know how to explain this piece...before I knew they were cherry blossoms...I just don't know...I let my mind cook up crazy things about that pink light in my memories...
A contest entry
- Short Stories... by MotherMachineGunn.
515 points, ended September 21, 2007, 14 entries
• next poem in this contest, remove from contest
Please tell me what you think
Comments
1 - 8 of 8
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As said before me,this is truly a beautiful story..you should really~ think about publishing this, very nice..MM
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Go raibh maith agat! (that means thank you)
Thank you so much for a wonderful comment! And for adding me. ^_^
I'm trying to get published..haha...one step at a time is what I say.
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I love it..I think the beauty of poetry is to have things enter the mind and we have honestly no idea at all where they come from...
I adore the imagery of color and anything involving nature is always so comforting to me..
I adore this write..
Peace and best wishes
~A~
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I really feel that...sometimes I have no idea where the words come from or if they even make sense when I put them together...
Nature is also very comforting to me...it's very special to me...especailly when I can just get out of the city and sit in the grass.
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That first long paragraph I’m reading is a really thick read! and poetry being thick, what you have is poetic prose there… now the whole paragraph would be easier to digest if you broke it up into pieces, for a reader can’t possible get it all in the first read… (and that kind of edit is what I call an ‘artistic’ edit…) Yes, reading the following paragraphs I think the reader NEEDS a line break between every image… otherwise they all swim together in a daze…! and not just a line break, this is a picture-book piece!
as for the contest- I’m not sure how your almost fairy-like piece will fare with the host, going by what groups (and thus writing subjects) the host has a predilection to…
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Haha...faerie-like...I love that!
Most interesting that this is a true event...it's about my memories! I have an almost strange affinity for cherry blossoms because of it...in June I make my mother take me to Maryland to go see them! Hey...it's not THAT far.
I'll definately consider that...I actually thought that BIG paragraph needed a little clean up myself...
Go raibh maith agat! (That means thank you) ^_^
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Ever think
That perhaps you should become a writer of childrens books. You have the talent. Contact Simon & Schuster in NYC
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Go raibh maith agat...all of that means thank you! Haha...
This was actually a school paper I did...
I've thought about writing books (and I am writing a book)... but not kid's ones though...but that doesn't mean I'll never write one. ^_^
Thank you very much.
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